Lists and awards, 12/31.

Hey, all. We've got the bubbly on ice here in Berlin and we're about an hour away from popping the cork. 2009's going to be a rough one for all of us, but let's do what we can to make it a year to remember - in a good way, of course. Aaron Hillis has some great things in store for GreenCine Daily and I'll see you over at IFC tomorrow.

"Swedish veteran director Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments received the highest number of nominations - eight - for the Guldbagge awards, Sweden's national film prize," reports Jorn Rossing Jensen for Screen.

Harry Tuttle indexes a year of "Crisis" in film criticism.

IndieWIRE editors run their own and industry insiders' top tens.

Criticwatch 2008: Erik Childress presents an astoundingly well-documented round of awards for the "Whores of the Year." Also at Hollywood Bitchslap: Peter Sobczynski's "Worst Films of 2008: Another Boll-Free List!"

"The Lumière Reader's film editors and contributors select the movies that mattered in 2008."

"I think between our toilet economy and the general pessimism in the air, there seems to be a free-floating dread seeping into movies." Sean Burns and Matt Prigge discuss the films of 2008 in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"Going to the movies isn't just fun and games. If you pay attention, you'll also get quite an education. While some of the facts we picked up at the theater in 2008 may seem to be of dubious value, you can be assured that if you saw it on the movie screen, it's 100 percent true!" Filmcritic.com presents "What We Learned at the Movies in 2008."

"More than ever, ambition in Hollywood has become a wage-slave in an Oscar-hungry boutique, trading desperately in the Christmas build-up and abandoning the rest of the year, like the Romans did their empire, to hordes of ravening cinematic barbarians. I saw some of the best films I've ever seen in the past twelve months - trouble is, they were all from last year." Still, Roderick Heath finds a few 2008 releases worth noting.

"There's certainly no shortage of ideas about the films and film trends of 2008 from the select crew of Bay Area filmmakers, critics and industry pros SF360.org polled for our Year-in-Film series," notes editor Susan Gerhard. Also, the "Top unreleased films" of the year.

"Notwithstanding Robert Downey Jr's performance of the year in Tropic Thunder, my favorite films of '08 tended toward the spare and simple, winning me over with eloquent reticence." Jonathan Kiefer's #1: Lance Hammer's Ballast.

"In 2008 I conducted nearly 60 interviews!" Michael Guillén looks back on ten of his favorites.

Michael Hawley's #1: Jaime Rosales's Solitary Fragments.

"2008, the year of death, decay and the wisdom of the beautiful loser. The year movie stars examined their own mortality and fading beauty via their on-screen personas (Brad Pitt, Mickey Rourke and Clint Eastwood, who managed to be as cute as Sarah Silverman while delivering his racial humor - I'm still wondering if that was his point - and I'm still fond of his weirdly toned movie.) The year Heath left us and Mickey came back and Robert Downey Jr became a superhero." By this point, you may be suspecting that Kim Morgan's #1 movie of the year is The Wrestler.

The standout in Michael Tully's enormous list for Hammer to Nail: Benh Zeitlin's Glory at Sea.

David Lowery looks back on the "Ones to Remember."

Zach Campbell offers "a few words on a film that I've chosen from what I saw during each month of this calendar year. These are not necessarily the best or most interesting films I saw in each given month. They're only meant to to pique curiosity, direct attention to interesting films, or perhaps vent a little snark."

Topping James Rocchi's ten: Steven Soderbergh's Che.

Ambrose Heron goes alphabetical.

"The retrospectives in 2008 were the highlight of the year for me," writes Acquarello: "filling the gaps from the idiosyncratic cinemas of such diverse filmmakers as Jean Eustache, Manoel de Oliveira, Teuvo Tulio and Nagisa Oshima, and discovering the richness of some national cinemas from the 'other' Europe, such as Slovenia and Romania." Also in the Auteurs' Notebook:

• David Cairns: "I barely seem to have seen any new films this year - I did vaguely 'keep up' by seeing stuff on DVD from the year before, but most of my explorations have been archaeological in nature."

• Harry Tuttle: "If the Film Criticism Crisis of 2008 taught us anything (new), this would have to be the inadequacy of audience's habits and critics' duty. Not a viable profession."

• Zachary Wigon: "Hunger (Steve McQueen) is one of the best films I have ever seen."

Earlier: Round 1.

Filmmaker's "Year in Review" series picks up again with entries from Mary Glucksman, Jason Guerrasio and Scott Macaulay. Earlier: Round 1.

At Screengrab, Paul Clark and Leonard Pierce agree at least on the best film of the year: Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

Bob Turnbull agrees, too, and he's got a slew of other lists to boot.

Topping Chicagoist Rob Christopher's list: Sarah Polley's Away From Her.

Josef Braun: "There are indeed more than ten films listed in my... best of, but I did manage at least to contain them all in ten groupings."

"With the elimination of a competing format, 2008 saw the establishment of the backwards compatible Blu-ray (BD) system as the high-end subset of the DVD format," writes Doug Pratt, introducing his "Top Ten DVDs and BDs of 2008" at Movie City News. "While it is less flexible and does not offer significant improvements in supplementary features (except enhanced interactivity and an ability to connect with other fans of a title online), the BD's sound and picture advantages are spectacular." His #1: the Blu-ray release of The Dark Knight. Also, Noah Forrest's #1: A Christmas Tale.

The AV Club lists the "Best DVDs of 2008." #1: The Films of Budd Boetticher.

Matt Dentler lists his "10 Best Festival Experiences of 2008."

More top tens at AICN: Capone (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Massawyrm (Frost/Nixon).

The Playlist's "Worst Films of 2008."

Tina Daunt lists the "Top 10 moments in 2008 celebrity activism" for the Los Angeles Times.

Nitesh Rohit recalls the highlight of "a year in the life of an Indian cinephile."

Amie Simon's #1 at the Siffblog: Tarsem's The Fall.

At IFC, R Emmet Sweeney lists the "Five Greatest Pratfalls of 2008."

Rex Sorgatz is wrapping up his almighty list of lists, but here's the fun one: the most notable blogs of the past year.

Ed Champion's been writing up the best books of the year all over the place.

In the New York Times, Ben Schott presents a quiz, "118 questions, and a fiendish election table, on the incidents, accidents, hints and allegations that defined 2008."

Tops and flops auf deutsch: Film-Dienst, new filmkritik and zitty.

More on the music of 2008: The Art of Memory, MS Smith and Bobby Solomon.

Online listening tip. Robert Horton's been taking calls.

Online listening and viewing tip. DJ Earworm mashes up "the Top 25 hits of the year, according to Billboard Magazine, arranged into a four and a half minute song."

Online viewing tip. Razia Iqbal looks back on the year in the arts for the BBC.

Online viewing tips. "It's hard to pick the 'best' videos of the year. There are so many reasons that they can be good," writes Mike McIntee at the UpTake. "So I've picked several based on my own categories."

Voice-LA Weekly. "Film Poll 2008."

"All hail Andrew Stanton's WALL•E - even us!" J Hoberman: "Sometimes, the movies really are universal. And so a major studio's mainstream, multiplex, mega-million-dollar-grossing, Oscar-friendly 'summer movie' resoundingly won the ninth annual Village Voice-LA Weekly poll of (mainly) alt-press critics, named on 35 of 81 ballots.... Not just the winner on points, WALL•E was also the movie about which critics felt most strongly.... That can only be quantified by the Passiondex^TM - a form of data-crunching developed with a nerdiness worthy of WALL•E."

Topping J Hoberman's own list is The Flight of the Red Balloon: "In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental performances, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius."

"2008 was that rare year in which critics and audiences saw eye to eye on at least two of the year's best films, with The Dark Knight and WALL•E sitting pretty on many '10 best' lists while also ranking among the year's five highest-grossing releases," notes Scott Foundas:

Does that mean Hollywood is getting better, or Indiewood merely worse? I'd propose that the verdict is out on the former and all but in on the latter, with the majors and mini-majors (those that are still in business) having effectively laid claim to the most promising indie talent (such as Christopher Nolan) and given them surprising creative freedom, while the one-time fertile terrain of true American independent cinema has turned depressingly fallow. If anything, all that the flash-in-the-pan hipster "movement" disaffectionately known (by those who knew it at all) as Mumblecore seems to have left in its wake is an unexpected nostalgia for those would-be Andersons (Wes or PT), Soderberghs and Tarantinos whose somewhat livelier brand of navel-gazing set the tone for the previous decade of Sundance follies.

And his #1's a tie between Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Wang Bing's Fengming: A Chinese Memoir.

Ella Taylor names Waltz with Bashir as her #1: "If ever there was proof that psychic agonies are not always best represented by realism, it's Ari Folman's soulful animated documentary about the deferred torment of former Israeli soldiers, himself included, who witnessed the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in 1982."

2008 finds independent filmmakers "stranded, as distributors cinch their wallets, exhibitors look vainly for indie success stories, and marketing costs continue to skyrocket in a flatlining economy," writes Jim Ridley. "Even so, a few models suggest ways to reboot or reroute a system that filmmakers and programmers agree needs fixing. In a year that has seen a few narrative features opt for self-distribution - director Randall Miller's Bottle Shock (which earned a respectable $4 million); the indie comedy Last Stop for Paul; Ronald Bronstein's way-underground whatsit Frownland - perhaps the most illustrative example of current conditions is Lance Hammer's Ballast."

Will 3D save the movies? Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks so. Robert Wilonsky reports.

SFBG. "The Year in Film 2008."

"As 2008's year-end pieces roll across the blogosphere, one encounters the alluring titles and stills of films which won't reach the Bay Area for months," writes Max Goldberg in his piece for the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "Year in Film 2008" package. "Against this tempting tide, I turn to the faint echoes of those undistributed movies which lingered in mind long enough after their festival screenings to become pliable to memory." His top ten's in alphabetical order, though he does linger quite a while on John Gianvito's Profit motive and the whispering wind.

Johnny Ray Huston's #1: Sarabande, "the time and place where [Nathaniel] Dorsky's devotional cinema reaches the sublime. This country priest of a film critic may be misreading the signs, once again, in making such a claim - but so be it."

Cheryl Eddy looks back on the year in bromance: "Bros before hos, always - but hos are still in the equation, and are indeed a key component of any bromantic relationship. Returning to Pineapple Express: the subplot about Seth Rogen's high school girlfriend was the film's weakest link, in kind of the same way Step Brothers was only funny when Will Ferrell and John C Reilly were together onscreen, and it was pretty clear that no chick at the end of any road trip could match the BFFF ['best fuckin' friend forever'] bond in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay." Her #1: Milk.

"If Obama and Milk succored with romantic promise and possibility, the stumbling close of the Bush years and his party's latest last-ditch follies provided the bitterest laughs, with doses of unexpected sympathy for the devil," writes Kimberly Chun, who, in lieu of a top ten, offers "Five for Flesh, Fantasy and Fighting."

"2008 sucked for movie musicals," notes Louis Peitzman. "While 2007 offered Hairspray, Sweeney Todd and Across the Universe, 2008 gave us Mamma Mia!, High School Musical 3: Senior Year and Repo: The Genetic Opera. Is it too late for re-gifting?" Still, topping his list of "Ten Guilty Pleasures" is HSM3.

Dennis Harvey lists his "16 Horrible Experiences at the Movies" (#1: Over Her Dead Body), "Best Performances Most Likely to Be Overlooked" and a top 25. #1: Battle for Haditha.

Topping Kevin Langson's list is The Edge of Heaven, but he dwells on his #8, Slumdog Millionaire, whose "character types and arcs are not new by any stretch of the imagination, but it is quite rewarding, amidst all the pleasure of rich visuals and suspense, to witness the victory of a dignified, perspicacious member of the underclass."

Matt Sussman stays indoors with the best DVDs of the year. His list: "Top Ten Leading Ladies (In No Particular Order).

More "Top 10s and More" from Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, Michelle Devereaux, Barry Jenkins and... more.

Moving Image Source. "Moments of 2008."

"Moving Image Source launched in June 2008. To commemorate the end of our first year, we invited contributors and colleagues, as well as some of our favorite writers and artists, to select their moving-image moment or event of 2008 - anything from an entire movie or TV series to an individual scene or shot, from a retrospective or exhibition to a viral video or video game."

It's quite an honor to be part of a round of contributors that includes the likes of Guy Maddin, Jonathan Rosenbaum and many others, and I'm doubly wowed by the Museum's posting of the trailer for Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army alongside my entry.

Update, 12/31: Part 2 features contributions from Todd Gitlin, Ed Halter, Jonathan Letham and many others.

Registry, Notable DVDs and Dave Kehr's top ten.

This year's round of 25 films to be added to the National Film Registry was announced this morning, "bringing the total number of titles on the list to the nice round figure of 500," notes Dave Kehr in an entry which also points to his piece in the New York Times on the "Notable DVDs of 2008" and features his own "alphabetical list of the best movies I saw in the last twelve months."

Regarding the Registry, Dave Kehr notes that "the annual lists have increasingly moved beyond the borders of Hollywood narrative filmmaking to include avant-garde, independent, documentary and sponsored work"; in the NYT, he argues that "DVDs are the primary force keeping film history alive." Murnau, Borzage and Fox is, of course, the "big one for 2008."

Boston Phoenix. Lists.

Peter Keough "invited some of my highly respected colleagues at the Phoenix to send me their ten best lists (and worsts, if so inclined)."

Michael Atkinson's #1: Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg; Tom Meek's: Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World; and Gerald Peary's: Chris Smith's The Pool.

Earlier: Peter Keough's own list.

Shorts, 12/29.

"The recent issue of UCLA's Asia Pacific Arts Magazine has a timely new feature on: 'Social Change in Asian film,'" writes Edwin Mak in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Change in politics and social life has been reflected in film from the earliest days of cinema. And it is by pure thematic coincidence that I have recently been re-watching and discovering more classics of the 1930s Chinese leftist film movement (Zuoyi dianying yundong). Its status as a truly unique movement in film history should be given its due."

"Classic Hong Kong and Japanese action scenes were 'expressionistic' in the sense that their larger-than-life balletics and aerobatics amplified recognizable (if extreme) possibilities of the human body," writes David Bordwell. "The result was a carnal cinema, in which shooting and cutting aimed to enlarge and prolong graceful movement. By contrast, Hollywood action scenes became 'impressionistic,' rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action but suggesting in their flurry a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn't serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it."

"Yoji Yamada, the veteran helmer who has become one of Japan's most consistent exports, will crank up his new pic Younger Brother (Otouto) in Jan," notes Mark Schilling in Variety. "After four period pics, including the 2004 Academy Award nommed The Twilight Samurai, Otouto will be Yamada's first contemporary drama in ten years."

Phil Nugent explains why he does not understand why Stanley Kauffmann, who's been reviewing movies for the New Republic since 1958, "should have turned out to be the one with the monopoly on job security."

"Typically, books on the history of American underground filmmaking follow similar timelines and trajectories and include a previously established canon of films and filmmakers," writes Mike Everleth. "However, Naked Lens, Jack Sargeant's survey of how the Beat literary movement influenced the avant-garde film world, gleefully veers off of the well-trodden path to take a fresh look at old classics and welcome new faces into the fold."

"More than any of his peers [Jim] Carrey makes explicit the need and narcissism that are at the anxious heart of comic performance," writes Dennis Lim. "Implicit in his always-on obnoxiousness is a poignant vulnerability.... In I Love You Phillip Morris, set to have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next month, his character is a cop turned con man who unexpectedly falls for his cellmate, played by Ewan McGregor. The prospect of Mr Carrey playing gay inspires a mix of exhilaration and dread. Will he be vulgar and regressive or flamboyant and transgressive? From this paragon of contradiction, perhaps the best we can hope for is all of the above."

Also in the New York Times:

• Jesse Green reports on the Bridge Project, "a new classical repertory company created by [Kevin] Spacey, [Sam] Mendes and Joseph V Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Designed to promote and embody the ideal of international, or at least trans-Atlantic, theater, the project aims to exploit the interpretive potential of artists with different backgrounds working together for many months, rather than merely dropping in for a few weeks on the West End or Broadway, waving as they pass."

• Looking back on The Star Wars Holiday Special and "a much shorter but no-less-cracked 1977 takeoff from Donny and Marie, Frank Decaro notes that these "appealingly tasteless artifacts live on in bits and pieces on YouTube, waiting for the unlikely day that the Force - that is, the seemingly unamused George Lucas - lets them see the light of DVD. Until then there is Quark: The Complete Series, Buck Henry's failed outer space sitcom, whose recent release on DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment was greeted largely with disbelief - although not displeasure - by cult TV aficionados, who never imagined the day would come."

• Vivien Schweitzer reports on "recent soundtracks written and performed by classically trained musicians who are finding new outlets for their talents in the booming video game industry.... The field has also attracted major film composers like Danny Elfman, Howard Shore and Hans Zimmer." Related, and via Momus: John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: "It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear.... The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists; if the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we're going to have a whole new art form."

Steven Shaviro: "I finally caught up with Abel Ferrara's 2005 film Mary: it was the one Ferrara feature (excluding his pre-Driller Killer pornos) that I had never seen before. Needless to say (at least for me, since I have expressed my enthusiasm for Ferrara before, and also, long ago here), it's amazing." Related: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on in the Tisch Film Review on Go Go Tales, "a world steeped in shadows that obscure faces, overcast by ethically questionable actions. Sometimes we're monsters, sometimes we do the right thing."

Also in the TFR, Ricky D'Ambrose interviews Ivone Margulies, author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday.

"If you watch several Holocaust films back to back, as I did recently (during the most wonderful time of the year, no less), you start to notice patterns," writes Ben Crair. "In fact, by my count, there are really only five basic Holocaust plots. Forthwith, Slate's taxonomy of the genre." Related: The brouhaha brought about by the happy-ed-up Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence reminds Wyatt Mason "of that obscene farce about which I wrote recently, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas."

"The Easy Life's ambivalent worldview may lack the singular formal curiosity of Antonioni (whose L'Eclisse is the target of the film's biggest punch lines) or the carnivalesque lyricism of Fellini," writes Kevin Lee, "but the way it mixes equal parts hipper-than-thou wisecracks, mainstream morality and tasty dollops of la dolce vita may account for its mass appeal."

James Mottram talks with Steven Soderbergh not only about Benicio Del Toro's performance as Che but also about other performances of historical figures, such as Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I and Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall.

Also in the Independent: Rachel Cooke talks with Debra Winger about Rachel Getting Married and her new book, Undiscovered, "a collection of brief essays and poems with illustrations of doors and windows by her friend, the famous tightrope walker Philippe Petit."

Brandon Harris talks with Lynn Shelton (My Effortless Brilliance and, heading to Sundance in a couple of weeks, Humpday) about her media diet.

Alejandro Adams argues the case for Tuya's Marriage.

John Patterson in the Guardian: "'Gimme a double bourbon, a soda back, none o' your Tejano bullshit and get lost.' That's Warren Oates's idea of calmly ordering a drink in the mythic, phantasmagoric Mexico of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, which leads the BFI's Sam Peckinpah retrospective this week. No wonder he dies in the end. It's amazing Oates lasts as long as he does."

Latest bio-entry at Movie Morlocks: suzidoll on Milos Forman.

"Folks who grew up as television came of age will delight in a 20-stamp set included in the Postal Service's plans for 2009 recalling early memories of the medium," reports Randolph E Schmid for the AP.

"The test of a truly original play may lie in its resistance to becoming easy fodder for films," argues Charles McNulty in a blog entry for the Los Angeles Times on Frost/Nixon and Doubt.

"Amália Rodrigues, the singer who made Portugal's hauntingly melancholic fado music famous worldwide, is drawing big crowds again - to see a controversial film about her life." Alison Roberts reports on Amália for the BBC.

Peter Sobczynski talks with Darren Aronofsky about The Wrestler for Hollywood Bitchslap.

"What about crimes against art and what should be viewed as Mr Cialella's heroic act?" Scott Marks comments on the guy who shot a father who'd been blabbing with his son throughout The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

"I wonder if we are living in the End of Days," writes Roger Ebert. "I do not mean that in a biblical sense. I mean that we seem to be irrevocably screwing things up."

Launching memes: Adam Ross ("New Year Movie Resolution") and Harry Tuttle ("Where is Film Criticism heading to?").

Online gazing tip. "Current Wexner Center Media Arts Residency Award recipient Guy Maddin recently sent us a few screen grabs from his current project which will premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January," notes Dave Filipi. "The work will be presented as a large public projection as part of an 'Urban Screens' initiative that includes Mexican director Carlos Reygadas among others." That top snap of Isabella Rossellini will likely remind you of two films at once, right off the bat.

Online browsing tip #1. In a slide show for the New York Times, Kathryn Shattuck talks with photographer Mary Ellen Mark about a few of the photos she's shot on film sets collected in the book Scene Behind the Scene and on view at the Staley-Wise Gallery starting January 9.

Online browsing tip #2. "British Avant Garde Film Graphic Art 1966 - 1985," via Mike Everleth.

Online viewing tip. The BBC looks back on the life and career of Paul Scofield. Thanks, Jerry!

Online viewing tips. Matt Bradshaw rounds up four notable new trailers at Cinematical.

Lists and awards, 12/29.

Acquarello introduces her list of "Favorite Films of 2008" (plus Honorable Mentions and Discoveries) by revisiting her top two: "During the introduction for the screening of La Question humaine, Nicolas Klotz talked about the film in the context of a 'trilogy of modern times' with La Blessure (my favorite film of 2005) and Paria - a means of taking a step back to examine the state of our humanity some one hundred years after the mechanization and technological advancement ushered by the Industrial Revolution. In a sense, Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City poses the same fundamental question at a time when the soul of the state-run factories - its community of displaced, obsolete workers - is being dismantled in the name of modernization, where structural steel and antiquated machinery are salvaged for scrap material destined to shape the landscape of a new China, while the workers who once inhabited their spaces are discarded. Like Klotz's film, 24 City is also searching for the traces of abandoned humanity within the murkiness (or rather, pollution) of history."

SF360 editor Susan Gerhard: "As has been our habit, we asked a variety of critics, programmers, exhibitors and filmmakers about their favorite films of the year." And throughout the week, there'll be more: "[W]e also asked them what trends are affecting them most, what technology has helped them along, and what films we've all been missing."

Dana Stevens goes alphabetical at Slate.

From Michelle Orange at IFC, "The Recession Jam... is a list of films that provide a little company for your misery, a little escapism for those that prefer it, and a couple of laughs, if you can manage them through your broke-ass tears."

Matt Riviera presents way more than a top ten (#1: A Christmas Tale); he's also got the "Top 5 documentaries," a string of bests in his own categories (many thanks for one of those, Matt), "10 moments of cinema which I can't (and won't) get out of my head" and nods to 10 actors under 30.

Following his list of the Top 25 Films of 2008 and a collection of "dream world" nominations and awards ("they don't entirely follow Oscar category ways"), Peter Knegt looks back on how 2008 played out for him, personally.

"After the embarrassment of riches that was 2007, the cinematic year of 2008 was closer to being just a plain embarrassment," writes Peter Sobczynski, introducing his list of "the 10 best films of 2008, along with a list of the 10 runners-up" at Hollywood Bitchslap. His #1: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Scott Weinberg's decided how he wants to look back over the highlights of the year in horror: "I love chronological order. My life, for example, is lived chronologically, and I wouldn't have it any other way." Also at Cinematical, Eugene Novikov's list of seven "Overlooked Indies of 2008" Elizabeth Rappe's list of the seven "Best Ensemble Casts of 2008."

Topping Harry Knowles's list at AICN: Let the Right One In; and Father Geek goes for The Dark Knight.

At PopMatters, Bill Gibron lists the "Top 10 Films of 2008 That You Never Heard Of." Actually, you'll have heard of his #1, [REC], but a good handful of the others were new to me.

Alex Billington lists the "19 Best Movies That You Didn't See in 2008" at FirstShowing, "a hand-picked selection of the best independent and mainstream feature films that were either quietly dumped by studios, ignored by audiences, or just not marketed well enough."

At Screengrab, Andrew Osborne's #1: Young@Heart. And Scott Von Doviak's: Synecdoche, New York. Also: the "Top 10 Unwatchables of the Year."

"Today I'm feeling more magnanimous than usual and have made a list that runs to a baker's dozen," writes Leonard Klady at Movie City News. "Ironically, only a handful are films that I consider truly distinguished but the rest fall a rung below and spill over the obligatory minion that has become the standard."

Nathaniel R begins his review of the year with a look at a handful of "Over-Appreciated Films" and the grand opening of his "2008 Cinematic Hall of Shame."

Vince Keenan picks five favorites and notes that "not only are none of these films year-end prestige releases, all five are already on video. You could watch 'em tonight if you wanted. In fact, you should." Also listed are "A Half Dozen Thrillers That More People Should Have Seen."

"Looking over the past year's standout DVDs I see two interesting trends," notes Josef Braun: "a steady stream of compelling westerns and fresh opportunities to appreciate the astonishing presence and emotional dexterity of the great actresses of Hollywood's studio era—sometimes both in the same title."

At the Parallax View, Sean Axmaker lists the "Essential DVD Debuts of 2008.

Kyu Hyun Kim offers a list of "Favorite DVD/Blu Rays of 2008."

Sweeneyrules at Rocket Video goes for Man on Wire before listing favorites (and least favorites) in several other categories.

Chicagoist Rob Christopher lists "10 Movies We Wish We'd Seen This Year."

"It was a very vigorous year indeed and, best of all, rich in surprises," writes Jonathan Romney in the Independent, where Nicholas Barber recalls a few more notable moments.

In conjunction with his other 2009 Blog Project, "which will document the 10th anniversary of all the great films from 1999," Jason Sperb lists the best American films of this decade.

"If there was ever a new year mixed with both misery and hope, it is this one," blogs Anthony Kaufman. "Many of us have high expectations for President Barack Obama, an economic turnaround and an indie film biz able to resurrect itself via new distribution models, but man, were the last 12 months a downer or what? Always a glass-empty kind of journalist, I took a moment to look back at my key articles of the year, and what they say about the state of things."

In the Independent: "Books of the Year: An all-star line-up of writers give their verdict on 2008's best."

Stuart Elliott in the New York Times on the year in advertising: "The best-laid marketing plans of mice and men - or Mad Men with mice - proved no match for a historic presidential race and an enormous financial crisis."

"Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House." From Cullen Murphy and Todd S Purdum (with Philippe Sands) in Vanity Fair: "The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history - distilled from scores of interviews - offers fresh insight into the roles of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players." All together now: Worst. President. Ever.

Online browsing tip. The New York Times presents "2008: The Year in Pictures."

Online viewing tip. In six minutes, the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Andrew Pulver, Catherine Shoard, Xan Brooks and Kira Cochrane look back over the year in film.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Matt Bradshaw picks the seven best trailers of 2008 at Cinematical. More from Paul Clark at Screengrab.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The "Best Political Comedy of 2008" at the Daily Beast.

Fests and events, 12/29.

Richard Brody in the New Yorker on Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, screening for a week at Film Forum starting tomorrow: "The sight of such deep-seated demons being liberated makes repression look downright appealing." Related: "The Mystic: The Films of Nicholas Ray" at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Update, 12/31: More from Cullen Gallagher (L Magazine) and Scott Foundas (Voice).

"In 2009, Swiss director Alain Tanner will turn 80 and all the young men born in 1976 who inherited the first name Jonah (from his film Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000) will be 33," writes Françoise Deriaz at Cineuropa. "To celebrate the filmmaker's long and successful career - which ended with Paul s'en va (Paul Is Leaving, 2003) - the French Cinémathèque in Paris is hosting a complete retrospective of his works from January 14 - February 15."

Now in its 14th year, the Berlin & Beyond series at the Castro brings new films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland to San Francisco. At the Evening Class, Michael Hawley previews the lineup and Michael Guillén takes a close look at Revanche. January 15 through 21.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals roamed the country for about half the year and the Lumière Reader is picking out the highlights. Tim Wong has the overview, while Steven Garden focuses on eleven films that remain unreleased and the Edward Yang retrospective.

Defiance.

"[W]hen my childhood friend Clay Frohman suggested we make a Holocaust-theme film based on Nechama Tec's book Defiance, I groaned, 'Not another movie about victims,'" recalls Edward Zwick in the New York Times. "'No,' he said, 'this is a story about Jewish heroes. Like the Maccabees, only better.' The triumph of the three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael, who fought the Nazis in the deep forests of Belarus and saved 1,200 lives, was unlike anything I had ever read about that dark time. Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns. Instead of helplessness and submission, here were rage and resistance."

Updated through 12/31.

"Can no one stop Ed Zwick's reign of mediocrity?" asks Nick Schager. "Zwick's trademark talk-explosion!-talk-gunfire!-talk template is at this point so set in stone that his latest could have been directed by any second-unit director, though there's little about this reality-fashioned-into-fantasy 'true story' - aside from leading man Daniel Craig's participation - that might reasonably entice aspiring auteurs."

"The problem with Defiance is that it so quickly becomes a bore," writes Edward Copeland. "When it gets to fighting scenes, especially the climactic battle, it looks like Zwick merely restaged his melees from Glory and The Last Samurai with actors in costumes from a different era."

The L Magazine's Mark Asch notes that the "action-movie cut and newsreel-like stock is a merging of two styles of film rhetoric that are mutually exclusive: fiction shaped for effect and reaction, and truth starkly presented for its moral urgency. So, um, bullshit."

"Zwick has crafted over two hours of repeatedly bad ideas," writes Lauren Wissot in Slant. "There's a mechanical, running-the-extras-through-their-paces kind of feel to the director's heartless filmmaking; the action-fighting Rambo motif is wearying; and the empty, clichéd platitudes that pass for screenwriting - like 'Our vengeance is to live!' and 'Every day of freedom is like an act of faith' - are cringe-worthy, as is the requisite, sad-sounding, violin score that accompanies them."

Kim Voynar, at least, finds something nice to say at Movie City News: "Where so many films tend to beat the audience about the head and shoulders with boulder-heavy exposition that spells out everything inwrenchingly contrived detail, Defiance allows the brothers to speak for themselves in a real and honest way; because of this, the relationship between Tuvia and Zus is one of the film's greatest strengths."

Updates, 12/31: "Defiance presents itself as an explicit correction of the cultural record, a counterpoint to all those lachrymose World War II tales of helplessness and victimhood," writes AO Scott in the NYT. "This is a perfectly honorable intention, but the problem is that, in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr Zwick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman) ends up affirming them. His film furthermore implies that if only more of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe had been as tough as the Bielskis, more would have survived. This may be true in a narrow sense, but it also has the effect of making the timidity of the Jews, rather than the barbarity of the Nazis and the vicious opportunism of their allies, a principal cause of the Shoah."

"[I]f there's one instance of the road to perdition paved with fat budgets and good intentions, it's Defiance, or, as I prefer to call it, Custersky's Last Stand in Belarus," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "There is at least one audible theme directed at the State of Israel: Should a Jew seek vengeance, or save lives?... And lest it be unclear in the text, Zwick elaborates in the production notes: 'It's a story that compels us to ask ourselves: What would I have done in those circumstances?' This is a question well worth asking in an age when we cluck passively while genocides rage all around us, though it's hard to see how it's addressed in Defiance. Zwick goes on: "And in that way, I think, it becomes a deeply personal experience [emphasis mine].' In what way? That we are all, by extension, victims of the Nazis?"

"It's too bad that Zwick didn't feel secure enough about what's best about Defiance - the film's action-packed scenes of armed resistance against Nazis fighting in Russia - and found himself trapped in another archetype, that of the serious, self-aware, Important Holocaust Drama," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Over the course of several projects, particularly the recent Blood Diamond, Zwick has become quite proficient at crisply done action sequences, and the frequent fire fights and killings in Defiance have a powerful effect," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Whenever Defiance departs from the harsher realities of its story, however, when it leaves behind the particularity of its story and deals with the generic, it risks trafficking in the kind of earnestness and sentimentality it is better off without."

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, round 3.

For a Vanity Fair cover story on Cate Blanchett, Leslie Bennetts "encounters a Hollywood anomaly: a star who doesn't do drama offscreen... and whose latest role, as Brad Pitt’s soulmate in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has her focused on aging and death." And there's an accompanying slide show.

"Hollywood set its sights on Fitzgerald as early as 1920," writes Susan King. "In the last 88 years, there have been myriad film and TV adaptations of his short stories and novels. Some worked, but many others strayed badly off the mark, perhaps because the novelist's poetic language and singular sensibility are difficult to duplicate on screen."

Updated through 12/31.

Also in the Los Angeles Times,Michael Ordoña talks with Taraji P Henson, who plays Queenie, "the proprietor of a New Orleans seniors home at the end of World War I who takes in an abandoned infant with the physical characteristics of an 80-year-old man."

"If you plan to visit New Orleans within the next few days," notes Joe Leydon, "you might want to pay a visit to The Clover Grill - featured prominently in a key scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - before tourists start flocking there in search of Brad Pitt."

Earlier: Robert Davis and rounds 1 and 2.

Update: "When Hollywood [had] the actual, still-living Fitzgerald nestled in its bosom, it may not have been able to overcome its natural aversion to the aura he then had as a washed-up failure - an aversion that Fitzgerald shared, and that may have contributed to his physical deterioration as much as the fast living and his alcoholism." Phil Nugent at Screengrab: "But it still loved his stories about scandal and blighted romance among the rich and the beautiful: it rushed to turn them into movies when they were hot off the presses and then, after his death, was quick to reconceive them as nostalgic odes to a vanished time."

Update, 12/31: The Great Gatsby may well be the "most reliably unfilmable novel of the 20th century," argues Xan Brooks, "if only because it looks so straightforward, so reassuringly high concept when it is actually a fiendish will-o-the-wisp; a deadly honey-trap for all but the shrewdest, most sensitive filmmaker."

Ann Savage, 1921 - 2008.

Veteran actress Ann Savage may have passed away on Christmas Day, but she will forever remain immortal in the hearts of movie buffs for her indelibly acidic portrayal of the ultimate film noir femme fatale: Vera, the hard-bitten hitchhiker who makes a bad situation infinitely worse for a hard-luck loser in Edgar G Ulmer's Detour, arguably the scuzziest great movie ever made. You can hear Savage talking about her role in that classic B-flick here.

Joe Leydon.

See also: AJ Schnack, focusing particularly on Savage's role in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, and the Wikipedia entry.

Updated through 12/29.

Updates, 12/29: "Shot in less than a week on a budget of $20,000, [Detour] would develop a reputation as one of the most febrile and unforgettable noirs ever to come out of poverty row," notes Phil Nugent at Screengrab, "and Savage's Vera would take her place in the history of the genre as one of the all-time greatest mistakes ever made by a man on the road, a woman who attaches herself to [Tom] Neal's doomed antihero like a virus. (It was the fourth and final movie that she made with Neal, who in 1965 would be tried for the murder of his wife and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He died in 1972.)"

"I have to wonder if she realized just what a big mark she left on film," writes Quint, who gathers some online viewing at AICN. "She must have as IMDB has her being saddled with accolades over the past few years, including being named one of the Top 10 all time villains for her femme fatale turn in Detour by Time Magazine."

Dave Kehr recalls several memorable performances in other films.

Chris Garcia pulls out a 2004 interview with Savage he conducted for the Austin American-Statesman.

"Ms Savage made it easy on film historians," writes Scott Marks. "Instead of forcing us to memorize dozens of titles, Ann Savage achieved immortality in one role. And never has a phone cord been put to better use. Hope you finally made it to Miam-uh, Vera!"

Cinema Scope. 37.

"As one of the direst and most depressing seasons of tedious holiday Hollywood product comes to a limp head, we present another issue of Cinema Scope that tries best to ignore most of that, and instead reflect on the films that mattered on the festival circuit (and, some, beyond) these past few months," writes editor Mark Peranson.

Most North Americans will be unfamiliar with the work of Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann, notes Robert Koehler: "Without the benefit of retrospect, there would be no way to fathom that with Revanche Spielmann has achieved a major artistic breakthrough; but even without having his past work in one's back pocket, it's clear that Revanche also marks something crucial to European film at this time."

Argentina, Brazil, Mexico. "And now it appears that the next big thing is coming from Chile." Quintín on Tony Manero: "It's not the scenes by themselves that bother me, nor the ugly handheld camera work, with an excessive amount of close-ups that make things look uglier. The problem with the film is the lack of purpose behind all the efforts from the filmmaker, the crew, and the cast. This resembles all too well the efforts made by the film's characters to be part of a Hollywood fantasy."

"Even by experimental/avant-garde standards, [Jennifer Reeves's] When It Was Blue is a rush," writes Michael Sicinski. "And so, while watching the film for the first time, I felt an acute, though indefinable, anxiety both about and from the piece, and only now do I think that I'm at least beginning to grapple with some of the formal parameters that stoke this feeling."

"Organically constructed and impressively humble, Our Beloved Month of August shows the fantastic, mythic elements present in everyday life, and the mundane realities present in filmmaking, presenting the two as links in a neverending chain of dominoes - and goddamned if, against all odds, it doesn't all come together." Mark Peranson interviews Miguel Gomes.

Adam Nayman talks with Sergey Dvortsevoy: "In its best moments, Tulpan seems like a particularly poetic piece of vérité, and this isn't any surprise for those who have followed the observational documentaries made by the Moscow-schooled filmmaker - Paradise (1996), Bread Day (1998), and Highway (1999), and In the Dark (2004)."

"On the periphery of the peripheries are alternative cinemas, one case in point being Chinese independent cinema," writes Shelly Kraicer. "Emily Tang's second feature, Perfect Life, is the most accomplished of this current crop of Chinese films."

Andréa Picard explains how "my first and as of yet only mock interview - a staggering 45 minutes of tremulousness, disbelief and unease amidst a rapid-fire exchange of ideas, memories, provocations, denunciations, poetry recitations, confessions, self-recrimination, and perhaps a healthy dose of fiction to temper the booze and smoke" - with the late Guillaume Depardieu, no less - came about.

It should be fairly clear by this point that Jonathan Rosenbaum has not actually retired. He's as busy as ever, only he's doing what more of what he actually wants to be doing. And recently, that's entailed bopping all over the world, making "Global Discoveries on DVD."

"'With this film I seem to have been successful,' says a visibly satisfied José Mojica Marins a few days after the midnight premiere of his magnificent comeback film Encarnação do Demônio at the 2008 Venice film festival." Christoph Huber (along with Vera Brozzoni, Markus Keuschnigg and Olaf Möller) meets a legend.

Andrew Tracy on Synecdoche, New York: "Where Bergman's introspection pushes outward, [Charlie] Kaufman's attempt at grand statement falls flat on its own diminutive premises. If any charge of disingenuousness need be levelled at Kaufman, let us at least grant that it's of an inadvertent variety."

"As much as it's a gay manifesto, Milk is a screed in favor of city governments that honour neighbourhood interests over corporate ones," writes Johnny Ray Huston. "Amid a new presidency, the US could stand to look at SF. Especially since California's recent Prop 8 battles are an echo of Milk's Prop 6 story, and Barack Obama's liturgy of change is influenced if not inspired by Milk's idea of hope.... For all his achievement and charisma, Harvey Milk is also a way for the regionally focused [Gus] Van Sant to snuggle up to his unrequited love, Hitchcock."

Lists and awards, 12/27.

"This was an exceptional year for documentaries and an unusually strong one for foreign-language releases, but in my judgment pretty tepid for American indie narrative features," writes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his list for Salon. "I'm not as sold on the whole low-budget American realism wave as some critics and filmmakers are." His #1: A Christmas Tale: "Even I think this is too predictable: the reigning champ of European art film at the top of the list. But just go and see Arnaud Desplechin's home-for-the-holidays flick, which brings together a bitterly divided family in the uncharismatic northern French city of Roubaix (the director's hometown), and tell me it's not a masterpiece."

Matt Riviera: "Not the best films of the year. In some cases, not even in the top 100. But these are my most memorable film watching moments of 2008."

At Screengrab, Paul Clark lists his "Favorite Movie Moments" and Phil Nugent adds comments and clips to his alphabetical top ten.

The BBC gathers some of "the most memorable quotes from the world of entertainment uttered during 2008."

Screen indexes its reviews of "the key films of the year."

Rolling Stone rolls out its "Best of 2008" package.

Guardian Review readers chime in on their books of the year; so do Daily Beast contributors.

The Literary Saloon rounds up half a dozen "Year-in-review articles."

Rex Sorgatz, keeper of the list of lists, names his top 35 albums of 2008.

Online listening tip #1. Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo discuss the films of the year.

Online listening tip #2. James Rocchi and Kris Tapley discuss all this year-end list-making.

India's 2008.

"Amitabh Bachchan slept with a gun." Also speaking out on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai have been Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, who recently blogged, "There is an Islam from Allah and very unfortunately, there is an Islam from the mullahs." Anupama Chopra in the Los Angeles Times: "This impassioned, unflinching outburst is rare for Bollywood.... [D]espite its cultural clout, Bollywood has largely been an insular, apolitical space":

But the terrorist attacks, which claimed 164 lives (plus those of nine gunmen), have forced the film industry to abandon its customary neutral stance. In blogs, media, petitions and peace marches, Bollywood has come forward to denounce the attacks and demand better governance. Most significantly, many leading Muslim stars who until now rarely delved into the controversies of religion have condemned the attacks as "un-Islamic." They have, as Gyan Prakash, professor of history at Princeton University put it, "reclaimed their religion." In an interview, actor Anil Kapoor, now appearing in Slumdog Millionaire, called the attacks "a tipping point," adding: "I think things will be different now."

Ramachandra Guha opens a special New York double issue of Outlook India, "Thank God It's Over": "For the citizens of India, the calendar year 2008 was marked and scarred by the malign activities of Islamic fanatics, Hindu bigots and linguistic chauvinists; by the arresting of the onward march of the Indian economy; and by cyclones and floods. This listing probably overlooks some other nasty things that took place this past twelvemonth. But even the incomplete evidence offered above begs the question - was this the worst year experienced by India (and Indians) since the country was founded?"

Of course, the movies of the year are revisited, too, in a special photo essay.

Infinite thØught is currently coming at us from India:

[A]s extreme as the economic disparity between the techno-elites and the crippled men who beg at car windows may be, the sweet smell of aspiration is everywhere: in every advert for a new apartment block, in each boast for the speed of broadband connection on signs by the side of the road, in every school promising to teach you e-knowledge and business English. But why not? Although India will suffer as everyone will from the dire outcomes of all the combined Ponzi-schemes of the Anglo-American financial imaginary, they are buffered slightly by a more old-fashioned kind of economic morality that says don't borrow too much more than you can pay off, don't have too much personal debt, don't lend to people who won't be able to return the cash. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger darkly invokes the figure of the India entrepreneur, all dynamism and techno-affirmation, but it's still relatively difficult in India to borrow money or employ people against the promise of financial pixie dust. Besides, if 70% of your population lives on 20 rupees a day, it's going to be hard to intricate them into a web of complicated mortgages and large personal debt.

"As Quantum of Solace shows us, the radical Muslim clerics and ex-Mujahideen don't have a monopoly on the human technology of harnessing the anger of the young for their own, cynical purposes," writes Gleb Sidorkin in the Tisch Film Review. "Before going into the psychological similarities between Bond and his handlers and Ajmal Amir Kasab and the militant masterminds that recruited, trained and dispatched him, I want to mention another striking similarity between the two killers: their use of gadgets."

As for those blogs mentioned up at the top, here are Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan. I've looked for Shah Rukh Khan's, but can't figure out which of the many that claim to be really are.

Spanish Cinema Now. 12.

James Van Maanen wraps it up. Meantime, I don't understand the logic behind the comment down here. Are these entries blocking your view of the others? Please: Read what you want, don't read what you don't. Besides, other festivals and events have chalked up a far greater number of entries, as if it were the count that mattered.

Last year's Spanish Cinema Now devoted a large chunk of its time (something on the order of 7¼ hours) to a Spanish television series about the country's Civil War, made up mostly of propaganda from both sides of the fence. The program was grueling in more ways than one (that many hours of propaganda, no matter which side you're on, can reduce you to a gibbering idiot). I recalled this TV series, off and on, as I watched what was perhaps the best program in this year's series, a documentary entitled Night Flowers (Flores de luna). In just two hours, with nearly every minute entrancing and vital, filmmaker Juan Vicente Córdoba takes us into the community of El Pozo del Tio Raimundo, often referred to simply as El Pozo and now one of Spain's more famous/infamous areas.

What makes the movie so special is the manner in which its director enfolds us into his story of this little district near Madrid, making it redolent of so much of Spain's history over the past 70 years until it becomes, not simply a microcosm of the country itself, but a kind of representation for neighborhoods worldwide that, over the decades, have risen, fallen and then risen again. Córdoba begins by introducing us to three generations of families that lives in El Pozo: high-school age children, their parents and grandparents. The kids are working, not very happily, on a school project that involves the history of their community. As the older members of the family offer their own two cents - history, reminiscences, opinions - we're off and running.

The director weaves his many interviews around the history of the place and a particular Catholic priest - Jose Maria Llanos - who had been a confidante and "teacher" of Generalissimo Franco, and, after coming to El Pozo to take stock and help out, seems to have been converted to the side of the poor and needy. (I wish more of Spain's priesthood had followed suit - and sooner, too.) At times during the two-hour documentary, it seems as though an entire movie could be devoted to Father Llanos alone. In any case, the movie offers a most interesting history, leading up to the 50th anniversary of the good father's involvement in the community.

The viewer sees El Pozo in its early, no-indoor-plumbing days, and its later stages, as things first improve and then slide into drug use and AIDS, during the 70s and 80s. What a joy it is to see the community flowering again in the 90s and 00s, even though its young people seem much less interested in it, as often happens when people grow lazy during "good times." One of the most interesting sections involves a group meeting between the generations about how best to handle an upcoming celebration. Each group wants what it wants, and getting the youngsters to actively participate takes some doing. Later, we see the results of this, and it's yet another cause for celebration - even if, toward the finale, we note the young generation's lack of commitment to further education coupled with its embrace of what looks to be some possibly dead-end jobs. Still, it ain't over till it's over, and we live in hope for these kids and their parents. (The grandparents' generation seems delighted - deservedly so - with what it has been able to accomplish.) Although shown only once at this years' SCN, and earlier this year's San Sebastian film fest, Córdoba's splendid documentary would seem a natural for Spanish television and might make a good fit for any documentary fest or American cable/public television audience that can handle subtitles.

This 12th dispatch brings to a close my coverage of this year's Spanish Cinema Now series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I'm sorry to hear that "david," in a comment after the 11th, finds Spanish cinema not worth a dozen entries. I disagree, and here's why. I have found, after years of attending, first a few, then a few more, then finally all of the films in the FSLC's European festivals (French, Italian and Spanish), that this is the only way in which I can be sure to see the best of each fest. (Yes, I could report only on those films I found to be especially good, but why slight the others just because I wasn't enamored?) Basing my attendance only on the program's description of the film, or on the film's director or cast, offers absolutely no guarantee of making the right choice(s). Nothing short of plunking down in the seat and watching the films in question does the trick.

This year, I would never have guessed that Suso's Tower (from the Javier Cámara retrospective), My Prison Yard, One-Armed Trick and the documentary Night Flowers would be my "don't miss" movies. (I'd already seen Torremolinos 73 and Talk to Her; if you haven't, consider these "don't miss" titles, as well.) Reviewing the better films ASAP might have given a few more people the opportunity to see three of the four films (the documentary, unfortunately, received only a single screening), as well as others I liked less but still found worthwhile. Overall, most of these films were worth a visit.

Three of the four genre films on display (Before the Fall, King of the Hill and Timecrimes) were smart - but fortunately not slick - examples of very dark apocalyptic, chase thriller and sci-fi films. ETA terrorism got two kicks in the head, both worthwhile, though neither proved classic: Everyone's Invited (great title!) and My Father's House. The fragile Spanish family was all over the place - in Pudor, Pretexts, Ashes from the Sky, Railroad Crossing, Hard Times, Fiction and elsewhere. And wonderful Spanish actors kept popping up and up and up - not only in the retrospective devoted to seven of Cámara's movies, but via Raúl Arévalo in Blind Sunflowers and My Prison Yard; Ana Wagener in My Prison Yard and Rated-R; Celso Bugallo in Pudor and Ashes from the Sky; Candela Peña in Rated-R, Torremolinos 73 and My Prison Yard; and Francesc Garrido in One-Armed Trick and Pretexts.

More than anything else, I think, I try to cover these fests because few other critics are doing so and certainly not in any festival's entirety. Acquarello brought her insight and intelligence to several of the Spanish films but beyond this, I saw no coverage from any of the print critics and little from bloggers. The FLSC's French fest gets ample coverage but, again, almost no critics, with the exception of the Times' stalwart Stephen Holden, bother too see all the films. As to the Italian films in Open Roads: again, little to no coverage. I do not buy for a moment that either Spain's or Italy's filmmakers deserve this treatment. The output of any country's movies is always a mixed bag: A few of the choices may stink, but plenty of the films are worthwhile, and some much more than that. The bottom line remains: You can't know which are which until you've seen them.

Shorts, fests, etc, 12/26.

"David Ehrenstein presents... Barbara Steele Day" at DC's.

Yesterday, Peter Nellhaus wished Hanna Schygulla a happy 65th.

"Sometimes I despair." No one remembers Groucho's best lines anymore, laments Paul Krugman.

"Of writing books about Charlie Chaplin there is no end, and much study of them is a weariness after the flesh. But this wonderful work is different." Martin Sieff reviews Stephen Weissman's Chaplin: A Life for the Washington Times.

"One of the best surprises in my overstuffed post box this week was a couple of copies of Robert Shail's new edited collection Seventies British Cinema," writes Dan North. "This book doesn't deny the prominence of crap movies in 70s Britain, but it does take them seriously as historically interesting cultural products."

"In 2001's Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001), [Jack G] Shaheen examined more than 950 Hollywood feature films and concluded that only 12 portrayed Arabs positively," writes Steve G Kellman in the Texas Observer. "His new book [Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11] is a sequel, an analysis of the same topic after September 11, 2001, when Arab terrorists attacked the United States. To update his study, Shaheen viewed films produced since 9/11. Although he finds that 29 of these present favorable images of Arabs, he concludes that 'The total number of films that defile Arabs now exceeds 1,150.'"

Also via Bookforum, Joel Stein in the Los Angeles Times: "How deeply Jewish is Hollywood?... The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies.... As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you'd be flipping between The 700 Club and Davey and Goliath on TV all day.

And also in the LAT: "Charlton Heston wants to know what I think of his Macbeth?" Nicholas A Salerno, professor emeritus of Victorian literature and film studies at Arizona State University, recalls a chat he can still hardly believe. Related: Anthony Giardina remembers Heston in the "Lives They Lived" issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Again, back to the LAT: "Yen Tan's Ciao is a revelation, a minimalist work of maximum effect," writes Kevin Thomas. "It is determinedly understated and consistently expressive, beautifully composed yet never studied."

"Che's role at La Cabana shortly after the 1959 revolution touches on one of the stranger moments from my time working at the Paris Review with George Plimpton." Helluva story from James Scott Linville in Standpoint.

"I'll just go ahead and say it: Without Preston Sturges, modern movies wouldn't be funny." For the New York Press, Eric Kohn previews Essential Sturges, running at Film Forum through January 1. More on "the Shakespeare of screwball comedy" from Jason Jude Chan in Fanzine; and in the Auteurs' Notebook, David Cairns supposes that rights issues keep Remember the Night from being an It's a Wonderful Life-grade Christmas classic.

More fests and events:

• IndieWIRE's Brian Brooks reports that the International Film Festival Rotterdam will open on January 21 with "the directing debut of scriptwriter, theater director and actor Michael Imperioli," The Hungry Ghosts.

• The Berlinale's Forum expanded will be doing a bit more of that in February as works will be on view in 13 galleries and exhibition spaces throughout the city.

• For those in Seattle, Kathy Fennessy recommends Dreyer's Day of Wrath, screening at Northwest Film Forum through January 1.

• Local roundups: The Cine-File for Chicagoland, Brian Darr for San Franciscans, Susan King for Los Angelenos, Phil Nugent for New Yorkers.

Kevin Lee on The Art of Vision: "In some ways, Stan Brakhage's 4-plus hour magnum opus isn't so much an epic of experimental cinema as the most intensely comprehensive horror movie that hardly anyone has seen." Also: "In terms of scale, Murder by Contract is a modest chamber piece compared to The Killing's multi-character symphony, but it cuts deeper into the same heart of male self-destructiveness underlying its most outrageous aspirations." And: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes: "This gently naughty poke at Sherlock Holmes's emotional life and sexual proclivities reveals an inner desolation in its title character (Robert Stephens) that amounts to the most touchingly humanistic portrait of a human being in all of Billy Wilder's work."

"Cory Arcangel's work has almost always played on the logic of the joke in its construction," writes Ed Halter, introducing his interview for Rhizome.

"What better way to celebrate Christmas than to begin filming another mini-masterpiece, God willing?" asks Ken Russell in the London Times. "Yes, my latest biographical romp, Bravetart vs the Loch Ness Monster, began filming last Sunday at the stately Walhampton School, a couple of miles up the road from my home in Lymington."

At the House Next Door, Zachary Wigon talks with Antonio Campos about Afterschool.

Susie Boyt's "My Judy Garland Life is the literary equivalent of one of those Tudor multi-roasts in which a goose is stuffed with a duck, a guinea fowl, a partridge and a quail," writes Frances Wilson in the TLS. "This is a memoir inside a biography inside a novel inside a play inside a meditation on hero worship, loss and excess. The result is a veritable feast, but we might savour most what Judy has taught us about loss: 'its memory and its anticipation lie at the heart of human experience,' and one's sense of it can be reduced by total immersion."

"Even dog lovers may want to take Marley & Me to the pound," writes Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post. "Based on the best-selling book by John Grogan, which chronicled his life with a large, lovable and deeply neurotic dog, Marley & Me proves the obvious: Not every book has a movie lurking in it." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Stephen Holden (New York Times), Robert Horton (Herald), Jim Ridley (Voice), Nick Schager (Slant), Betsy Sharkey (LAT), Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Stephanie Zacharek (Salon).

"New Year's Eve movies are responsible for perpetuating some of the most pernicious, ridiculous, self-defeating myths in our collective unconscious," argues Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle, where Kevin Kelly talks with David Hare about adapting The Reader. Related: James Rocchi talks with Reader director Stephen Daldry for Cinematical.

"The Wrestler's very much first-time dramatic script by Robert D Siegel - and direction by the newly vulnerable Darren Aronofsky - is tailored so gently to [Mickey] Rourke's bloated abdominals and lifted face that the punch-drunk pussyhound redeems even a climactic allegory positing him as both George W Bush and Jesus H Christ," writes Mark Asch in Stop Smiling. More from Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Dennis Harvey (San Francisco Bay Guardian) and Christopher Orr (New Republic). And Michael Guillén interviews Aronofsky.

"With every review I read of Doubt, I get the nagging feeling that I've seen a different film," writes Sean Axmaker in the Parallax View. "I wonder of having seen the stage play is preventing viewers from actually seeing the film."

"[I]n a shift to make fans of highbrow horror cheer, studios are starting to concede that torture as entertainment has run its course," writes Brooks Barnes. If My Bloody Valentine 3D scores, the next big thing, then, may well be, yes, 3D.

Also in the New York Times: "Pageant goes behind the scenes, dreams, breakdowns, freakouts, sequins, glitter and fabulous falsies of the Miss Gay America pageant, an annual competition for female impersonators who are every bit as dedicated (and hysterical) as mainstream beauty queens," writes Nathan Lee. More from Martin Tsai in the Voice.

"The SAG Strike for Dummies" - a helpful FAQ from John Lopez at VF Daily.

Tim Lucas: "A posting by Lee Peterson at the Mobius Home Video Forum reports the sudden death of exploitation cinema expert, fanzine publisher, 42nd Street projectionist and actor Bill Landis from a heart attack." More - and more links, too - from Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay.

Online viewing tips. The Observer's Jason Solomons interviews Baz Luhrmann, but Mark Kermode's take on Australia is a whole lot more fun.

Lists and awards, 12/26.

"I first saw Happy-Go-Lucky in Berlin last winter, and I loved it so much, and with so few reservations, that I thought surely a second viewing would reveal some cracks," writes Stephanie Zacharek of her favorite film of 2008. "No dice. Mike Leigh's story of an exceedingly cheerful North London schoolteacher - played by Sally Hawkins, in the finest performance of the year - is an intimate masterpiece, the kind of picture that's so effortlessly multilayered that it's in danger of being called 'light.' 'Luminous' is the better word."

At MSN, Richard T Jameson and Kathleen Murphy present "Moments Out of Time 2008: Images, lines, gestures, moods from this year's films."

"[T]he distinction of the best American narrative film of the year belongs to Michel Gondry's evidently-undervalued Be Kind Rewind." But neither of Tativille's writers, Michael J Anderson and Lisa K Broad, put it at the top of their lists. Anderson's #1 and Broad's #2: Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman. Broad's #1 and Anderson's #2: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata.

"This year I've taken things down to my top 25 - getting it down to ten would've been far too painful - chosen by a completely random and arbitrary process that basically boiled down to my really, really liking it." Todd Brown, alphabetically, at Twitch.

"Last week, just before everyone powered down for the holidays, we asked FilmCatcher staff, curators, and contributors for their personal thoughts on one movie that made an impact or that brought the most pleasure this year."

Topping Peter Keough's list in the Boston Phoenix: Waltz with Bashir.

Time Out New York's critics chime in with bests and worsts: Melissa Anderson's #1: Silent Light. David Fear's: Happy-Go-Lucky. And Joshua Rothkopf's: The Wrestler.

Shawn Levy introduces a batch for the Oregonian: an overview of what it's like to digest 500 of the 800 new films that screened in Portland this year; the list (in alphabetical order); and odds and ends: individual top tens, worsts, double bills and the underrated.

Cinematical lists the "25 Hottest Things in Movies 2008."

"All in all, the year in docs was, like our very culture, disparate and spread thin in identity." An overview from Aaron Hillis at IFC. "Critically acclaimed films like Trouble the Water, The Order of Myths and Up the Yangtze were little seen outside of New York, LA and a handful of festivals, and some of 2008's finest docs (my first thoughts point to Guest of Cindy Sherman, Anvil! The Story of Anvil and In a Dream) have yet to see the light of theatrical distribution."

"At Participant Media, Bryan Stamp worked on a number of notable docs this year, including Errol Morris's Oscar shortlisted Standard Operating Procedure and two films that are sure to be seen more in 2009 - Food, Inc and Pressure Cooker." And he looks back on some of his favorite nonfiction films of 2008 at All these wonderful things, where AJ Schnack interviews Patrick Creadon (I.O.U.S.A.).

The cinetrix travelled far and wide to put her list together. Her #1: Encounters at the End of the World.

At the top of Aaron Dobbs's list: Synecdoche, New York.

Kevyn Knox's list goes to 14 - plus a special mention. His #1: Synecdoche.

Finding The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at the top of Kent Jones's list for Sight & Sound (PDF) has given Robert Davis pause.

A Christmas Tale tops Nathan Gelgud's ten.

Sean Axmaker put the Murnau, Borzage and Fox set at the top of MSN's list of the year's best DVDs.

The Japan Times: "In carefully ordered rankings for Japanese films and no particular order for the rest, we bring you the best films of a year that is steadily drawing its curtains closed." #1: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata.

"The Oklahoma Film Critics Circle has announced its third annual list of awards for achievement in film, giving top honors to Slumdog Millionaire as the year's best motion picture."

At the SpoutBlog, Michael Lerman lists what he argues are the "Most Misunderstood Films of 2008."

More actresses: Dennis Cozzalio and Bob Westal. Marilyn Ferdinand's moving on to actors, though.

Joe Bowman is listing, listing, listing.

"Screen looks at some of the key issues for the international film industry in 2008." Parts 1, 2 and 3.

In the Washington Post, Jen Chaney lists "2008's eight most memorable DVD moments, a collection of extras and overall releases that kept me glued to that couch cushion, happy to be entertained, enlightened and far, far away from a treadmill."

David Kamp writes the epitaphs for Vanity Fair's "Hall of Infamy, 2008."

Matthew Smith introduces City Pages' package of profiles of "some of the year's most inspiring musicians, writers, visual artists, dancers, filmmakers, and more."

Art critic Jed Perl has a terrific list of his favorite books of the year. Also in the New Republic, John B Judis presents a "Crisis of '08 Reading List": "As capitalism itself - or at the least the vaunted miracle of the free market - becomes problematic, the left is poised for an intellectual comeback. So here are four topics and some books to read about them, plus a few articles, from someone who learned economics by reading and rereading Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital."

Vulture gathers its greatest hits and favorite posts.

Online browsing tip. "The Year in Michael Musto."

Online scrolling tip. Get the Big Picture selects the "Best Movie Posters 2008." Via Coudal Partners.

Online listening tip. IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore "wrap up the year with a look at our best-ofs, an offering of worst-ofs and biggest letdowns and a round-up of the films we're most looking forward to in 2009."

Online viewing tip. Robert Horton hosts an hour-long conversation with Kathleen Murphy, Andrew Wright and Jim Emerson about the best (and worst) films of the year.

Online viewing tips. "Only one thing happened in 2008, and that was that stupid finally went out of style on November 4 when we elected Barack Obama to be the 44th President of the United States of America," writes Northwest Film Forum children's programs director Liz Shepherd. "It was a nail-biter, a cliffhanger, a grand opera and one very long Google search to get there. It was a year of hope and change and YouTube. Could any of us have survived without these clips?"

Interview. Ari Folman.

"Waltz With Bashir is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, Waltz is by no means the world's only animated documentary, a phrase that sounds at first like a cinematic oxymoron. Movies like Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Brett Morgen's Chicago 10 have used animation to make reality seem more vivid and more strange, producing odd and fascinating experiments. But Mr Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power."

David D'Arcy talks with Folman about what makes an animated film vital long after its technical wow-effect wears off.

Updated through 12/29.

"Although it can be highly explicit in detailing war's horror, Waltz with Bashir is mainly concerned with the recollection of trauma," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Linking the slaughter of the Palestinians to the experience of Folman's parents in Auschwitz, the filmmaker's analyst-friend points out that 'the massacre has been with you since you were six.' In its final convulsive minutes, Waltz with Bashir goes to graphic news footage—breaking the subjective spell with the full, awful weight of TV images that constitute collective memory."

"Memory is always an unreliable witness, which is why this plunge down the PTSD rabbit hole needed to be animated," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "It's the only medium that can do Folman's excavations justice, exposing both his repressed recollections and the collective denial of a nation. The coup of the film is that by the time clarity hits - tellingly, via actual, real-life images - the shame has become everyone's: Israel's, Folman's, yours, mine. Even before that revelation, however, Waltz with Bashir has already left an imprint. It is, in a word, unforgettable."

"How does one avoid overly aestheticizing violence when using animation?" asks Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. "By its very design, the new film by Ari Folman... invites serious questions of representation, not least because the narrative is told from behind thick layers of computer-generated cartoon imagery. That Folman, working ostensibly within the narrative boundaries of documentary, manages to circumvent nearly every one of these ideological and aesthetic concerns testifies to his intelligence, compassion, and sophistication as an artist."

"Thoughtful, wrenching, and uniquely beautiful, Waltz with Bashir more than lives up to the hype that's been building since its Cannes debut in May," writes Chris Wisniewski for indieWIRE.

"Move over, Romania," advises Darrell Hartman in Interview. "Israel is the new breakout national force in world cinema."

Waltz "plays out as one of the most profoundly explosive animated documentaries I have ever seen, and is clearly one of the best pictures of the year," declares Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"Like the pack of wolves bearing down during the opening credits, the pressure is on to be impressed with Waltz with Bashir," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine, "not just for its visual flair but its openly critical view of Israeli foreign policy. Folman's belated exposé of atrocities committed in a Palestinian refugee camp may be politically correct, but it's also banal."

"The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique," finds Tasha Robinson at the AV Club, "is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people."

More talks with Folman: Steve Erickson (Film & Video), Andrew O'Hehir (Salon) and Ella Taylor (LA Weekly).

Online listening tip. Folman is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Earlier: Reviews from New York.

Updates, 12/29: "[D]espite some lively moments of absurdist whimsy (the titular sequence in which a shell-shocked soldier pauses in a dangerous no-man's land, firing off random rounds from his Uzi, shuffling around in odd dance-like bursts), the sharp, inky animation which both distances the viewer from the horrific war-time events and creates its own moments of unexpected beauty and Folman's shrewd understanding of the way in which memory (fails to) operate, Bashir comes off more as sketch than completed project," writes Andrew Schenker.

Folman "has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there.... You could argue that the film has no business forging such beauty out of savage facts. What comfort is it to the relatives of the Sabra and Shatila victims, you might ask, that a few conscripts who stood by and did nothing are now free to articulate, and even to lyricize, their internal pain? My suspicion is that Folman is all too aware of that charge."

"Some filmmakers use images of slaughtered women and children for cheap shocks; others are more scrupulous, but so literal-minded that our defenses fly up," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't—to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream."

Susan King talks with Folman for the Los Angeles Times.

Last Chance Harvey.

"Even when they're walking uneven shoulder to shoulder and hitting their professional marks note for note, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson don't make a lot of sense as a screen couple," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But there's something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey, which means that when he looks at her and she looks at him, there's a good chance that they won't be the only ones in the theater falling for all the hokey lines and shy glances."

"Can a heartwarming meet-cute as unambitious and overtly sentimental as Last Chance Harvey be simply too nice to get beat up on by anyone other than the coldest of bastards?" asks Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Besides being old pros who could elevate such schmaltz in their sleep, Hoffman and Thompson - despite the 20-plus years between them, and her graceful restraint in contrast to his creepy assertiveness - have a genuinely sweet chemistry, which is the exact and only reason to seek this one out."

"Like any fairy tale, it assumes an audience who can identify with its characters, who can enjoy vicarious satisfaction when the unlikely comes true or when knots come magically untangled," writes Eric Hynes for indieWIRE. "But there's a gap between pleasing and pandering to an audience, and one needn't belong to that audience to smell the difference."

"Unbearably scored to within an inch of its bippity-boppity-booing life, the film follows Harvey, a commercial jingle impresario played by Dustin Hoffman, to London as he clumsily negotiates run-ins with friends and family on the eve of his estranged daughter's wedding," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "By film's end, Harvey is ready to live even as you're ready to die."

"It's mildly refreshing that Last Chance Harvey isn't tween-minded, but that doesn't mean this adult rom-com is smart, funny or moving," sighs Nick Schager

David Goldman in the L Magazine: "Sure, there are picturesque shots of London, and Hoffman and Thompson try to bring this story to life, but despite a few touching moments there's little for them to work with - no witty banter, no memorable supporting characters, and a script so lackluster director/screenwriter Joel Hopkins (Jump Tomorrow) couldn't even come up with a decent father-daughter confrontation."

"This is the 38-year-old Hopkins's second movie, and the themes that began in his first, 2001's Jump Tomorrow, flow through it, although guided by a far more confident hand," writes Betsy Sharkey, the new film critic for the Los Angeles Times. "Jump caught Thompson's eye and the two talked - a conversation that led Hopkins to write the role of Kate for the actress. There were hints of what a teaming of Thompson and Hoffman might look like in 2006's Stranger Than Fiction. Within a few short scenes, they anchored each other, creating a balance, an organic rightness, that made you hunger for more. It is a promise largely realized in Last Chance Harvey. And while there are some false notes along the way, when Kate asks, 'Shall we walk?,' follow Harvey's lead and say yes."

"If there's one reason to sit through Harvey when it turns up on cable (or on that trans-Atlantic flight), it's the always-watchable Thompson, who somehow makes us believe that someone who walks, talks and looks like Emma Thompson could be starved for male companionship," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"In these times of institutionalized bad manners onscreen and off, it is refreshing to see a movie smoothly returning to an age of courtesy and courtliness leavened by wit and genuine sincerity," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Rachel Abramowitz talks with Hoffman for the Los Angeles Times.

Bedtime Stories.

"Bedtime Stories, starring Adam Sandler, is a great example of how a sweet, simple pitch can be tugged in so many directions by competing desires that it gets ripped to shreds," writes James Rocchi for Redbox. "The film's set-up, for example, establishes Sandler's character - but it's boredom on a stick for any kids in the audience. And the computer-generated hamster will make kids laugh - or, based on how often director Adam Shankman cuts away to it, that's the desired effect - but it'll repel grown-ups who want the saucier, sassier Sandler they know from films like Billy Madison and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Bedtime Stories is made to have something for everyone, and winds up offering very little to anybody."

"While no one was expecting the live-wire daring of Punch-Drunk Love or even You Don't Mess With the Zohan, the Adam Sandler who shows up in Bedtime Stories is that most unnecessary of movie-star guises: the benign family-comedy guy," sighs Tim Grierson in the Voice.

"Adam Sandler is at that difficult age," notes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "Now 42, he's too old to continue with the bungling, man-child shtick of yore, yet too young to transition to old-fogey infantilism."

"After sitting through this fractious fairy tale, we feel as plucked as a Christmas goose," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "[I]f Shankman was aiming for The Princess Bride's mix of fantasy, facetiousness and romance, or even the meta-fable sprawl of Stardust, he missed it by a mile."

"A handyman at a luxury hotel that, in its initial motel incarnation, was owned by his father (Jonathan Pryce), Skeeter Bronson (Adam Sandler) is asked by his grating killjoy sister (Courteney Cox, naturally) to babysit his niece and nephew, a chore to which he first grudgingly agrees and then wholeheartedly embraces once he discovers that the bedtime stories he invents for them each night are coming true," explains Nick Schager in Slant. "Typical of the entire enterprise's sloppiness, the reason for these magical circumstances is left fuzzy (it has something to do with Skeeter's imaginative father and wishing)."

"Sandler's laziness, sloppiness, and cynical pandering are all over Bedtime Stories, and it turns what's intended to be a graceful intersection of fairytale whimsy and real-world slapstick into an ugly, head-on collision," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"[W]atching Bedtime Stories is about as delightful as peeking into your Christmas stocking and finding it empty except for a few lint-covered peppermints," writes Jette Kernion in Cinematical.

"There's a surface liveliness to the movie, but it has that plasticky Disney quality and lack of real heart," finds the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

"With Bedtime Stories, Sandler continues his winning streak of appealing and humane comedies," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Maybe it was seeing how PT Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002) went wrong (turning whimsy into dark paranoia) that convinced Sandler how movies ought to entertain."

Spanish Cinema Now. 11.

Another pair from James Van Maanen. Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.

The Walter Reade Theater saw more genre-film excitement as the Spanish Cinema Now series drew to its close. Couple this with a narrative tale about environmental activism that quite literally prefigured the following day's top story in the New York Times, and you've got a knockout double bill.

"Coal Ash Spill Revives Issue of Its Hazards" read the Times headline for its Christmas Day front page story about how the Tennessee Valley Authority has played down the risks of what may be the nation's largest spill of coal ash, despite questions about its potential toxicity. The previous day, I'd watched a charming grandfatherly type with some interesting paternity issues (Celso Bugallo, who also played the grandfather in SCN's Pudor) go up against the powers that be: city fathers, a large corporation and even one of his own relatives over the toxic coal ash that's been falling for decades - contaminating everything from newborn cattle to produce, water, and the fertility of some of its male population - on his town of Valle Negrón.

In director/co-writer (with Ignacio del Moral and Dionisio Peréz) José Antonio Quirós's Ashes from the Sky (Cenizas del cielo), the environmental becomes political and personal. When his van breaks down mid-trip, a travel writer (Scotsman/Spaniard Gary Piquer) finds himself drawn - first out of need, then interest and finally desire - to a local family. Through this character, who acts as our surrogate, we learn all about the town, its people and problems. No one is demonized and yet the problem - a polluting power plant - is made clear, as are the various forces struggling for control of a situation that never should have occurred. Once in place, however, the plant has become almost impossible to subdue.

To their credit, the filmmakers understand the enormous frustration some of the locals (farmers in particular) feel and suggest alternatives ranging from the peaceful to the violent - without condoning the latter. They also understand how jobs (the plant is one of the area's major employers) figure into the mix. As with any good story, however, it's the characters who rule. There are even a couple of hot sex scenes (two of the actresses here are rather profoundly endowed), and a little male full frontal.

An unusual mix, Ashes from the Sky won an award for best environmental film at the 2008 Tokyo International Film Festival. In its relatively quiet manner, the movie offers at least tentative hope, while admitting the enormous difficulties at hand. It's the kind of film that, once seen, you will remember well but, due to our current economic climate and usual paucity of foreign fare, will probably not have the opportunity to see again. In short, it's another example - and a very good one - of why Spanish Cinema Now matters.

A movie that you may have the chance to see theatrically, or at least on DVD (the Weinstein Company has picked it up), King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) is also one of the most disturbing films in the "thriller" genre that I can recall. Because this year's SCN is rather heavy on genre films (thriller, horror, apocalypse, sci-fi - not to mention prison and terrorism), most of which seem to offer a massive dose of hopelessness, it is difficult not to take this as a comment on the Spanish (maybe European, maybe the whole of western culture) experience at the moment. If not, then coincidence is very heavily at play.

Directed and co-written (with Javier Gullón) by Gonzalo López-Gallego, this is the kind of film that demands to be seen before it is read about (and spoiled). It is bleak. Very bleak.

But because I want to write about it, I must warn you - Spoiler Ahead! - even though I will try to be as subtle as possible in my spoilage. King of the Hill is a "chase" movie that takes its title, appropriately enough, from an old and pretty well-known children's game. It is solidly in the tradition of recent dark European scare films such as Ils (and its crappier and uncredited American remake, The Strangers), Calvaire, À l'intérieur and Frontière(s) - though without anything like the gore quotient of the latter two. That it comes from Spain, the country that also gave us ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? is not, I think, coincidental. Finally, it is yet another variation on one of this genre's favorite - and seminal - film, The Most Dangerous Game.

Interestingly enough, King of the Hill made its debut well over a year ago at the 2007 Toronto film fest. That it has taken this long to "arrive" is, I think, both a tribute and a slap-in-the-face to the darkness at its center. Boasting a very small cast (I counted only seven speaking roles/visible faces), the film grabs you within a couple of minutes (via sex) and then again barely a couple of minutes later, with a bullet. By the finale, when our "hero" asks the question (really more of a plea) "What is this about?" be prepared to go begging. You'll learn something of the answer but not much. The rest will be left to your imagination - which is always more scary than any explanation. I put "hero" in quotes above because, by the end, you can barely use that term for the character played (as usual, very well) by Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia, who lends the film his enormous sensual appeal, talent and willingness to take on all kinds of projects. María Val Verde compliments Sbaraglia well as his nemesis-turned-companion, and Pablo Menasanch, as the younger of two policemen, has the best moment of all. Wounded atop a rocky slope, his face contorted in terror and questioning, he mirrors perfectly what viewers and characters alike are in for from this dark, nasty and unforgettable little thriller.

Eartha Kitt, 1927 - 2008.

A family friend says Eartha Kitt, a sultry singer, dancer and actress who rose from South Carolina cotton fields to become an international symbol of elegance and sensuality, has died. She was 81....

Kitt, a self-proclaimed "sex kitten" famous for her catlike purr, was one of America's most versatile performers, winning two Emmys and getting a third nomination. She also was nominated for two Tony Awards and a Grammy.

Polly Anderson, AP.

See also: the official site and the Wikipedia entry.

Updated through 12/29.

Update: "Ms Kitt, who began performing as a dancer in New York in the late 40s, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler," writes Rob Hoerberger in the New York Times. "With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her 'the most exciting woman alive' in the early 50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of Time Runs, an adaptation of Faust in which Ms Kitt played Helen of Troy."

Updates, 12/26: "In the 20s and 30s, other non-white American stars - Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Nina Mae McKinney, Anna May Wong - had left their homeland with its crushing racial roadblocks, to find work and acclaim on the continent," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "But they were in the middle of their careers, and never matched their European eclat back home. Eartha was just starting hers. And in postwar America, the movies, Broadway and cabaret were more welcoming to black performers, especially ones with a touch of aristocratic or sexual exotica: Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Eartha - not Keith - Kitt."

"Even today it's difficult to imagine an entertainer, upon an invitation to the White House, having the guts to use the occasion to directly confront the administration." Ted Johnson recalls the famous incident at a luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson.

"[I]t wasn't until I interviewed Eartha Kitt at the 1982 Toronto Film Festival that I learned what a wuss I truly am when it comes to serious imbibing." Joe Leydon's got a great story to tell.

Online viewing tips. Rosie Swash gathers two clips for the Guardian and Bob Westal's got four more.

Updates, 12/27: "It is no accident that Ms Kitt's seesawing career reascended during what has been called the new gilded age, now suddenly behind us," writes Stephen Holden in the NYT. "Especially in the 1970s age of feminist consciousness, the very term 'gold digger' was considered offensive, along with 'cat fight,' 'chick' and a whole dictionary of sexist slang that has since roared back into style. For a while at least, Ms Kitt's catwoman persona seemed a nostalgic, camp artifact. That persona is a complicated mixture of ingredients. Ms Kitt's early years in Europe were a crucial formative factor. Marlene Dietrich's imperious femme fatale, Josephine Baker's exotic expatriate, the emotionally exacerbated cry of Édith Piaf and even the voice of Maria Callas could be detected in her singing."

"By chance, I spent Christmas Eve at an Olvera Street restaurant, where the entertainment included LA's marionette master Bob Baker and his matchless puppets," writes Reed Johnson in the Los Angeles Times. "One number had Baker pulling the strings of a larger-than-life-size pink female pussycat, purring out one of Kitt's signature tunes, 'Santa Baby.' The kids loved it. The adults smiled. It was sexy and fun, naughty but nice. Which is to say, it was pure Eartha Kitt."

Update, 12/29: "There have been many attempts to describe Kitt's extraordinary voice," writes Adrian Jack in the Guardian. "Kenneth Tynan got it wrong when he spoke of her vibrato, for she hardly used it. Although she cultivated a tremor for special effect, her pitch was remarkably clean, and she would bend it, very often sharp, with slow deliberation. She said she understood everything her voice could and could not do."

Harold Pinter, 1930 - 2008.

The Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, has died. Pinter, who was suffering from cancer, died yesterday aged 78.

Haroon Siddique, Guardian.

The death of Harold Pinter comes as a great shock. We all knew, of course, that he had endured a succession of illnesses ever since 2000. But there was a physical toughness and tenacity of will about Harold that made us all believe he would survive for a few more years yet. Sadly, it was not to be....

Updated through 12/31.

Pinter's contribution to drama was immense. He had a poet's ear for language, an almost flawless sense of dramatic rhythm and the ability to distil the conflicts of daily life. I believe his plays, from The Room in 1957 to Celebration in 2000, will endure wind and weather. Indeed many of them already, such as The Birthday Party, The Homeconming and No Man's Land, have the status of modern classics. Pinter was also, of course, a highly political animal, as evidenced by his later plays, his crusading articles and speeches and his famous Nobel Lecture which brilliantly skewered the lies surrounding US foreign policy.

Michael Billington, Guardian.

See also: HaroldPinter.org and the Wikipedia entry.

Updates: "In more than 30 plays... Mr Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence," write Mel Gussow and Ben Brantley in the New York Times. "Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace."

"Among contemporary dramatists Harold Pinter holds a unique place," writes the London Times. "Few, if any, have so lastingly and so profoundly influenced fellow playwrights — not just in this country but beyond.... David Hare wrote that Pinter never offered audiences 'the easy handhold with which they might be able to take some simplified view of the events on stage,' and that 'it is this willingness to say "take it or leave it" which finally makes his work so inimitable.'"

"The plays were usually set within the confines of a room," notes the Telegraph, "seedy in his earlier work but increasingly elegant later. His dramas brought into confrontation a variety of persons, from vagrants and prostitutes to middle-class married couples and self-proclaimed poets, in circumstances bordering on violence or menace and in language that was precise, elegant and often very funny.... But what gave distinction to all Pinter's writing for the stage and screen was its fascinating opacity. The curtain would rise on a realistic, domestic situation but within minutes the truth about it - and whatever might be gleaned of the people in it - would be called unconsciously into question by their statements."

"Pinter's best-known, early plays have been filmed, but, perhaps because they depend so much on the heat and dazzle of live performance, getting the transition from stage to screen to take has often proven problematic," writes Phil Nugent in Screengrab. "But Pinter's strongest impact in movies came through screenplay adaptations of others' work - and he did a surprisingly large number of them, especially as his standard of living improved. Among the ones that stand out are his adaptation of Penelope Mortimer's novel The Pumpkin Eater for Jack Clayton's 1964 film, and the first of his many collaborations with the director Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), both starring Dirk Bogarde. He also wrote Losey's 1970 The Go-Between and prepared a script for a film based on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past for which Losey was never able to obtain funding; it was published in book form as The Proust Screenplay, and eventually adapted to the stage."

"He earned two Oscar nominations for adapted screenplay," notes Edward Copeland. "One for adapting the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and one for adapting his own brilliant play Betrayal. The story about a romance told in reverse chronological order starred Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley and remains one of my favorite films. It even inspired the great backward Seinfeld episode called 'The Betrayal' where a character was named Pinter in further homage."

Ed Champion pays tribute Pinteresquely.

Updates, 12/26: "Pinter radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness - a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired."

"Although he expressed the views of a pacifist, Pinter wrote as if he held his finger on the pin of a grenade," writes Peter Marks in the Washington Post. "Violence of some nature was never out of the realm of possibility, even in his quietest plays. For Pinter was a connoisseur of subtext, of letting a story unfold on a living room set while a more savage one simmered in the crawl spaces of the mind. His characters routinely rattle each other with what never gains utterance."

James Wolcott quotes a fine passage from Simon Gray's The Last Cigarette.

"The death of this most anti-Establishment member of the Establishment was announced just as the whole country, so it seemed, was settling down to the most conventional of our festive meals," notes the Independent. "What is more, Pinter's broadcast obituaries preceded the day's great set-piece, the Queen's Christmas message, by a mere couple of hours. As someone in the business of staging and upstaging, he could hardly have done better for theatricality."

Also, former literary editor Robert Winder: "Among his more famous accomplishments - the vivid and original theatre, the world-spanning production schedule, the screenplays, the political fury, the Nobel Prize - there is a fraternity of cricket-lovers who will raise a glass and remember him for other things: the tenacious innings, the warm letter of congratulation, the implacable raised finger."

Granta gathers linkage.

Online viewing tip. Dan Callahan and Kevin Lee on The Go-Between.

Update, 12/27: "His writing for cinema covered a remarkably wide spectrum," writes Geoffrey MacNab after picking out a few notable performances, too, for the Independent. "He scripted thrillers, costume dramas and one very overwrought sci-fi yarn (the ill-starred adaptation of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale.) He even directed a film, a 1974 adaptation of Simon Gray's play Butley starring Alan Bates as an academic whose life is coming apart at the seams."

Updates, 12/28: "A great dramatist? Maybe. But also slippery one," argues Nick Cohen, who also argued with Pinter face-to-face over the years. In the Observer, he recalls their opposing positions on Saddam vs the Kurds and Milosevic vs just about everyone but the Russians. "I know you should never judge artists by their politics. Pinter's double standards and defences of tyrants may not stop history seeing him as a great playwright any more than Auden's support for communism and Yeats's flirtation with fascism in the 30s stopped them being great poets.... Pinter's darkness was a part of his greatness. He could dramatize men's will to dominate and their betrayals so well because he knew them both too intimately."

Also, Susannah Clapp: "What makes Harold Pinter important - exhilarating as well as frightening, generous as well as premonitory - is that he showed the peculiarity and richness of everyday language. He made us listen to ourselves more closely."

And Richard Eyre: "[B]y the age of 18 I had seen only two professional productions: Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic and Much Ado About Nothing at Stratford. Then I saw The Caretaker and I felt something like Berlioz encountering Shakespeare - 'coming on me unawares, [he] struck me like a thunderbolt,' to which he added 'and at this time of my life I neither spoke nor understood a word of English.'"

Update, 12/29: "Pinter will be remembered for doing what postmodernism claims you can't do any more: create a complete and consistent imagined world." David Edgar in the Guardian.

Updates, 12/31: "Family and close friends of playwright Harold Pinter have gathered to say farewell at a private funeral," reports the BBC.

"The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity; a poem or a play, no difference. These facts are not easy to reconcile." The Guardian runs an extract from a speech Pinter gave at the National Student Drama festival in Bristol in 1962.

Also, half an hour of online listening. "A few months before his death, Harold Pinter was interviewed by actor Harry Burton at the British Library to commemorate the donation of his archive. In this edited version of their conversation, Pinter reminisces about his years in rep theatre, talks about his relationship with his father, discusses his poetry - and explains why not everything Alan Ayckbourn says about him is true."

FilmCatcher's Damon Smith revisits "Peter Hall's nervy, studiously faithful adaptation of The Homecoming (1973), which Pinter scripted. One of the finest American Film Theatre productions of the 1970s, it's also one of my all-time favorite stage-to-screen adaptations, as it seems both organically rooted in the squalid decay of Edward Heath's Britain and, through Hall's exquisite editing and shot composition, eminently cinematic too."

Bruno S. "Mamatschi."

I had no idea. Accompanied by what may well be the perfect online viewing tip for this Christmas, Michael Kimmelman's portrait of Bruno Schleinstein is a haunting heart-warmer. Or is it a tender admonishment?

During the 1970s Bruno was the star in two remarkable Werner Herzog films, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, in which he occupied the roles of damaged characters so completely and genuinely, so uncannily, that it was never quite clear how much he actually understood about what use was being made of him by the director. His performances were riveting, but he was obviously not well mentally, and even as he came across in his own way as knowing, he was at the same time simply being himself, and the question hovered: How much was fiction, how much reality?

Then he dropped down the memory chute.

Not after this piece, appearing, after all, in the New York Times. Bruno S now performs in Berlin at "the Stadtklause, a cozy wood-paneled dive near the remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the grand railway station torn down after the war." And today: "'He will take his accordion and his bells and go around the houses, and one of the songs for sure will be "Mamatschi,"' Bruno announced. 'Because this will touch people.'"

A very merry.

"The friction between the rock of Jesus and the hard place of cruel, quotidian living is perhaps central to the appeal of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, and certainly to the Christmas special. The nativity comes to us swaddled in such cynicism that it seems hand-tailored for the lapsed evangelical." Joseph "Jon" Lanthier on A Charlie Brown Christmas.

"[F]or Christmas, there is a pervasive compulsion to summon reserves of tolerance, generosity, congeniality and child-like upbeat-ness, and we go to extraordinary cultural lengths to make it happen. Hence, the phenomenon known as the Christmas movie, all of which serve as narrative windows into that edenic space where cold hearts are warmed, charitable love dawns on the greedy, and, most of all, the childhood memories and the purest notions of home become easier to grasp and hold." Michael Atkinson and Laurel Shifrin introduce an annotated list.

Updated through 12/25.

"This may be obvious for some, but because I saw all the canonical Christmas films on VHS or DVD, I struggle with the notion that a good holiday film can actually play in theaters," writes Dan Jackson in the Tisch Film Review. "Up until last month I thought it was impossible. Then Arnaud Desplechin proved me wrong."

At Movie Morlocks, highhurdler offers a list of "Classics, Contemporaries, Shorts and Full Length Features to get you through the Holidays."

Dave Hill in the Guardian on the remake of Miracle on 34th Street: "I can't recall the year we first watched it all together, but it's become a tradition for as big a bunch of us as can be arranged to snuggle down at some point during the Christmas build-up and once again soak up John Hughes's adaptation of the original story, directed by Les Mayfield. It's soppy, sweet, funny, cute, completely absurd, casts Jane Leeves of Frasier fame as an ally of the villain, contains a walk-on by Allison Janney who became CJ Cregg in The West Wing and a soundtrack burst from Aretha Franklin that always makes me weep."

Also: "Christmas movies come in four basic varieties: the cuddly, the cloying, the cretinous and the cute," growls Joe Queenan.

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge lists "Six Films Incidentally Set During Christmas."

Updates, 12/25: Dennis Cozzalio presents "Professor Kingsfield's Hair-Raising, Bar-Raising Holiday Movie Quiz."

To "all those who are willing to bend the rules to make a holiday brighter, the Siren dedicates this story. It's from Anita Loos's completely charming book about her relationship with silent stars Constance and Norma, The Talmadge Girls."

The doors are all open now on Alonso Duralde's "Christmas Movie Advent Calendar."

At Cinematical, Jette Kernion presents seven ways to watch A Christmas Story.

In the Washington Post, Jen Chaney presents her "Third Annual Unconventional Holiday DVD List."

Online viewing tip #1. Ambrose Heron's found a "Christmas Movie Montage."

Online viewing tip #2. Sally Cruikshank's "Blue Blue Blue Xmas."

Online viewing tip #3. Joe Leydon's found Santa Claus, circa 1898: "Just three years after Auguste and Louis Lumière unveiled their cinématographe in Paris, British film pioneer GA Smith made this extraordinary short. As Michael Brooke writes for the British Film Institute, Santa Claus 'is a film of considerable technical ambition and accomplishment for the period.'"

Online viewing tips. At Screengrab, Phil Nugent's got Wladyslaw Starewicz's The Insects' Christmas (1911) and The Junky's Christmas (1993), "a twenty-minute claymation short directed by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel... based on a William S Burroughs story from the 1989 collection Interzone that Burroughs read aloud on the Hal Willner-produced CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales."

More Christmastime browsing and viewing: David Cairns, Jonathan Lapper, Kimberly Lindbergs and Phil Nugent.

L Magazine. Top Tens.

"The best film to grace our theaters this year, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon is, in its clean, well-lighted long takes, weightless and grounded, frantic and placid, modern and timeless, Eastern and Western, and cheaper than therapy," writes editor Mark Asch, opening a package of top tens in the L Magazine.

More lists to be read at leisure over the holidays: Jesse Hassenger (Snow Angels), Nicolas Rapold (Still Life), Michael Joshua Rowin (Synecdoche, New York), Henry Stewart (Synecdoche), Benjamin Strong (Profit motive and the whispering wind) and Benjamin H Sutton (probably Happy-Go-Lucky).

And Cullen Gallagher looks back on ten "cinematic spectacles that either can’t be replicated in the comfort of your own home, or wouldn’t be the same on DVD."

See also the L Magazine's "Best Albums of 2008," a review of the year in theater and Paddy Johnson's picks for the highlights of the year in art.

Fests and events, 12/24.

At Twitch, Ard Vijn has news of an interesting project the International Film Festival Rotterdam is cooking up: Films to be made by Nanouk Leopold, Carlos Reygadas and Guy Maddin for three very, very, very large outdoor screens.

"Sternberg had Dietrich, and Godard had Anna Karina - malleable, mysterious subjects whose faces eagerly absorbed the light their directors shone upon them. Preston Sturges had William Demarest." Jim Ridley: "Of the 10 features in the Film Forum's Essential Sturges, running Christmas Eve through New Year's Day - roughly the time frame encompassed by the wistful Barbara Stanwyck-Fred MacMurray gem Remember the Night - the ex-pug and former vaudevillian shows up in eight, and his combustible presence is so key to their speed, spirit, and tone that they're unimaginable without him."

Also in the Voice, Nick Pinkerton on Dave Fleischer's Hoppity Goes to Town, also at Film Forum from tonight through January 1.

Colin MacCabe in Criterion's Current on Opening Bazin, a conference held a couple of weeks ago in Paris: "The Yale event was extraordinary not simply for the eminence of the critics gathered, both from France and America, but for the striking fact that almost all of them had done considerable original research for the event, many in the archive of Bazin's complete writings that Dudley Andrew has established at Yale. The picture that emerged at the conference was of a thinker whose fundamental engagement with the nature of cinema makes him an essential reference point as the cinema finds new forms, both in museums and on the Internet, while remaining the key crystallization of value in the entertainment industry."

"Gabe Klinger, one of the heads of the non-profit that's put the event together, Chicago Cinema Forum, asks me to help him fix his bowtie. Today is Manoel de Oliveira's 100th birthday and Gabe intends to make an announcement. [Michael] Almereyda is standing at the back of the room as people trickle in. He has a gentle voice; a listener, a watcher, as Paradise will suggest." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in the Tisch Film Review.

Valkyrie, round 2.

Both the New Republic's Christopher Orr and Slate's Dana Stevens begin their reviews with a run-down of the long and troubled run-up to Valkyrie's release, finally happening tomorrow. "The movie still fails by the standards of $100 million Hollywood star action vehicles, and by the standards of World War II Oscar-bait epics," writes Orr. "But by the standards of anticipated career-crushing trainwrecks, it's pretty good."

As Stephen Metcalf "suggests in his glorious reading of Tom Cruise-as-market-bubble, the notion of the stolidly perky Cruise playing a one-eyed, one-handed would-be Hitler assassin is just inherently funny," writes Dana Stevens. "Given all these obstacles, Valkyrie comes off surprisingly well.... For a thriller with a thoroughly foreordained outcome, Valkyrie does a pretty good job at making the viewer's palms sweat. Especially so soon after the tedious pieties of The Reader, I'm not sure I want more from my Nazi holiday viewing than that."

Updated through 12/29.

"Director Bryan Singer drums up some tension around the actual attempt (via explosive)," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "But that's 15 minutes at most in the middle of a movie you realize just moments in was probably doomed to be a flat, pompous bore even before shooting started."

"Singer's first non-superhero picture in a decade is more respectful than the Nazi-themed (and underrated) Apt Pupil; indeed, it initially strains for portent, as if running on excess gravitas from his serious but sly X-Men movies." Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine: "Once the conspiracy gets going, though, Valkyrie settles into swift B-movie territory: kinetic pans and meaningful glances abound in a sort of super-retro Mission: Impossible, and bonus suspense mounts over how the coup must inevitably fall apart. Valkyrie doesn't have many layers... but its pulpy defiance is crisp, succinct, and oddly satisfying."

"Valkyrie's across-the-board miscasting (and accompanying one-note performances) doesn't do the story any favors," writes Nick Schager in Slant, "but then again, neither does Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander's script, which skimps on character relationships and motivations - aside from implausibly casting every other Nazi party member as a closet Hitler hater - in favor of configuring the tale as a straightforward thriller."

"Even when saying goodbye to his wife and kids for a final time, Stauffenberg never seems like a man for whom there's anything at stake - maybe missed dinner reservations." Robert Wilonsky in the Voice: "Valkyrie feels like another installment in the never-ending franchise - not just the action-movie one, but the Tom Cruise one. Like the operation itself, it's a good idea - just not well-executed."

"[T]here's a gaping hole at the center of Valkyrie, and his name is Tom Cruise," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "He's the only actor in the film not doing either a British or a German accent... and he spends every moment on screen glowering and purring angrily. The actor appears lost without being able to launch his usual charm offensive, and whatever dark sides that Oliver Stone was once able to plumb from this performer seems nonexistent. If only his work here had an ounce of the nasty pleasures of Cruise's Tropic Thunder cameo."

Similarly, Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York: "When Valkyrie tightens the screws like a poor man's Munich, it's decent enough. But what I wouldn't have paid to see the Cruise of Tropic Thunder pull off another brilliant cameo, raging in his bunker behind the button mustache."

"I have a theory," offers Amie Simon at the Siffblog: "if you're aiming to create a great film with all German characters - maybe filling your cast with famous Brits (Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp - and... Eddie Izzard) and putting an American (not just any American actor - the Tom Cruise) in the starring role is not the wisest move."

As alternative or complementary viewing, Joe Leydon recommends Hava Kohav Beller's Oscar-nominated documentary The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Inside Germany, 1933 - 1945.

Earlier: Round 1.

Updates, 12/25: "Mr Singer appears to have taken cues here from Black Book, Paul Verhoeven's World War II romp, but he's too serious to make such vaudeville work," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Stauffenberg, who hated Hitler but worshipped the Reich, sacrificed himself on the dual altar of nationalism and militarism, which makes him a more ambiguous figure than the one drawn in Valkyrie. He's a complex character, too complex for this film, which like many stories of this type, transforms World War II into a boy's adventure with dashing heroes, miles of black leather and crane shots of German troops in lockstep formation that would make Leni Riefenstahl flutter."

"A man who is struggling to take down the old order." Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post: "It's hard to know whether this film is channeling Nietzsche or L Ron Hubbard. Those who harbor dark fears of Scientology may want to watch the details closely: Does the film downplay von Stauffenberg's Christianity or acknowledge it in passing? Does it equate the conspirators with some kind of secret order with cult-like tendencies? Or is all of that entirely too much to read into a Tom Cruise film?"

"Valkyrie can't decide if it wants to be a sturdily constructed modern-style thriller (McQuarrie also wrote Singer's first big hit, The Usual Suspects) or an old-timey suspense entertainment packed with movie conventions," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Singer throws in a little from Column A and a little from Column B, and not all of it works."

"[T]he film is a minor Christmas miracle," argues the Oregonian's Michael Russell: "It succeeds on its own terms, despite the gossip hounds' best blood-sniffing efforts, and dares to be an entertainment rather than a statement."

No, counters Nathan Rabin at the AV Club: "Despite its potential to be a turkey for the ages, Singer's blandly proficient historical thriller is fatally forgettable."

Updates, 12/26: James Rocchi talks with McQuarrie for Cinematical.

"I never once (for a second) 'bought' Tom Cruise as a grizzled, burnt-out, one-armed German army officer in the new wartime thriller Valkyrie," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical, "but because he's a movie star who knows how to carry a flick, he still anchors the tale with a strong and crisp screen presence. And while, yeah, it is a little distracting to hear high-ranking German soldiers speaking with American, British and Irish accents, the simple fact is that Valkyrie is a very slick old-school-style adventure movie. In some ways it feels like a perfectly enjoyable mid-50s war movie that's been re-made with only the finest in modern cinematic technology. The plot is pure potboiler, but the look is grade-A Hollywood."

Updates, 12/27: Rachel Abramowitz talks with McQuarrie, Cruise and Singer for the Los Angeles Times.

Michael Russell interviews McQuarrie.

Update, 12/29: "You knew it would be bad, and it is," writes Fox News film critic Roger Friedman in a piece that's taken many by surprise. "I'm more concerned that Valkyrie could represent a new trend in filmmaking: Nazi apologia."

"It's silly to expect 'necessariness' from any movie, and there's no crime in handsomely assembling a moving diorama of a fascinating historical event," writes Justin Stewart in Reverse Shot. "Effective 'thrillers with import' that avoid proselytizing might be only a master's game; successes from Army of Shadows to Munich show how skillfully it can be done. Singer's not there yet, obviously; his film is closer to Enemy at the Gates or Hart's War. His treatment of the 20 July Plot of 1944 is as slick and vapid as The Usual Suspects. It's Apt Pupil meets X-Men and probably exactly what he was hired to make."

New York's David Edelstein doesn't seem to be aware of the historical background of the animosity between Germany and Scientology, but fine, he gets to crack his little joke. Then: "Valkyrie doesn't whip you up like that Jewish vigilante avenger picture Defiance, but in this season of throat-grabbing Holocaust movies, its gentlemanliness is most welcome."

"Character acting is, of course, one of the four things that the British still do supremely well, the others being soldiering, tailoring, and getting drunk in public, but you can have too much of a good thing, and there were points in Valkyrie when I felt that I was watching a slightly outré installment of the Harry Potter series," writes Anthony Lane, and the New Yorker lets it slide.

Theater of War.

"In his inspired, inspiring essayistic documentary Theater of War, the filmmaker John Walter jumps from art to history and politics and back again, from the theater of the streets to the theater of the stage, without pause," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "That makes the movie, which follows a Public Theater production in Central Park of Bertolt Brecht's epic play Mother Courage and Her Children, tough to summarize, which is part of its appeal. Because while the movie is about a particular staging of Mother Courage, it is also about the war in Iraq, theater (and bicycle riding) as social protest, the necessity and futility of art, and the agonizing human failing that Mother Courage gives voice to in 'The Song of the Great Capitulation.'"

Updated through 12/25.

"For anyone interested in the continuing relevance of theater in a society dominated by momentary electronic impulses, in the responsibility of artists in wartime and in the greatest anti-capitalist, anti-government, antiwar and anti-romantic playwright of the 20th century, Walter's cool, capable, stimulating exploration is a must," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. A "great strength of Theater of War is that, in the spirit of its subject, it gets you thinking about a lot of questions not easily answered. How and why did Brecht's plays, constructed to combine popular culture and the avant-garde, become the exclusive province of the left-wing intelligentsia?... And after his courageous defiance of Nazism and McCarthyism, why did Brecht accommodate himself so readily to the communist regime in East Germany?"

"Meryl Streep is arguably America's greatest living musical-theater actress," writes James C Taylor in the Voice. "Anyone who saw the two-time Oscar winner shamelessly mug and prance through the mindless movie musical Mamma Mia! earlier this year might call me certifiable, but those who caught her Mother Courage in Central Park two years ago would probably agree."

"Walter tries not only to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle spirit of a zeitgeisty staging in its formative state, but also tries to enrich it with a crib-notes portrait of the original production, Brecht's personal history, the specter of Nazism, the legacy of the Hollywood Ten, the pallid political mood of Bush II America, and the nature of motherhood," writes Eric Henderson in Slant. "It's almost as though Walter is trying to back up one commentator's point that Mother Courage is the finest theatrical work of the 20th century by connecting it thematically to basically everything else that happened in the 20th century, which isn't necessarily advisable when Brecht purposefully decontextualized his work, divorcing it from contemporary events and instead setting it during the Thirty Years War."

James Van Maanen has "had a good, long talk with Mr Walter."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Walter "about convincing Meryl Streep to let him film her, working in the tradition of Citizen Kane and Rashomon, and making a film version of Moby Dick with real whales."

At Film Forum through January 6.

Updates, 12/25: "The Streep material alone would be enough to recommend Theater of War," writes Chris Wisniewski in Reverse Shot, "but Walters has also included a few terrific sequences in which he reconstructs scenes from the play by cutting among rehearsals, footage from the 2006 production, and voiceovers from the original Berlin production starring Brecht's wife, Helene Weigel, illustrated with photographs of the show. These brief scenes achieve something Walters's talking heads never manage: while respecting the historical specificity of 1949 Berlin and 2006 New York, they reveal Mother Courage and Her Children's relevance to both moments. Streep describes the play as 'a living thing…an organism.' And it's then, as Walters jumps between decades using Brecht as his guide, that this is made thrillingly palpable."

Noel Murray at the AV Club: "While Theater of War contains a few direct, empathetic moments - like [Tony] Kushner describing how Mother Courage changed his life when he read it in college, or Streep explaining that she sees her role in theatrical revivals to be 'the voice of dead people' - Walter would rather we care about the ideas this film raises, not the people we meet. Which is very Brechtian, to be sure, but not always so engaging."

The Secret of the Grain.

"French cinema is alive and well in 2008 (Ryan Werner, rejoice!)," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail, "as evidenced by several high profile releases that have made their way into American theaters: Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, Laurent Cantet's The Class, Guillaume Canet's Tell No One and Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long. For my money, the year's best French offering isn't one of those titles. It's Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain. At two-and-a-half hours, The Secret of the Grain unfolds with a Cassavetes-like disregard for conventional cinematic time; here, scenes are extended beyond their normal length to create a more lived-in and realistic air. Kechiche's gritty fable isn't just a refreshing antidote to the much more common, artificially optimistic cinema that treads similar narrative terrain. It is also a poignant family drama convincingly set inside France's ever-changing cultural borders, as well as a profound universal commentary on the curse of being poor and uneducated in this, or any other, era."

Updated through 12/27.

"Mr Kechiche started out as an actor and has established himself, after directing three features (La Faute à Voltaire and L'Esquive before this one), as one of the most vital and interesting filmmakers working in France today," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In The Secret of the Grain he immerses us in the hectic, tender, sometimes painful details of work and domesticity. The camera bobs and fidgets in crowded rooms full of noisy people, so that your senses are flooded with the warmth and stickiness of Slimane [Habib Boufares] and Souad's [Bouraouïa Marzouk] family circle. The scenes, though they feel improvised, at times almost accidentally recorded, have a syncopated authenticity for which the sturdy old word realism seems inadequate."

"It's not a perfect film, but perfection requires an organization that would instantly betray the racially-crowded French-Tunisian lineage, along with its past, present, and future matriarchs," writes Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant. "The film is a rarity becoming increasing more common: a surreptitious creation myth crafted to inspire pride in even the most diverse and elusive of ethnic identities."

"There's no question that Kechiche's film was massively popular in France (where it swept most major categories in the Césars, or French Oscars, last year) partly because it depicts the Arab immigrant experience in a country currently wrestling with the meaning and cost of multiculturalism," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But an even better reason for the popularity of Secret of the Grain is that it's a movie that's so damn French, about people who've become so damn French, couscous and all."

"There's an inordinate amount of table-setting, but everything comes together in the end - French attitude, family melodrama, heavy drinking, mad Maghreb rhythm," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The Secret of the Grain escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian."

Writing in indieWIRE, Leo Goldsmith finds Secret to be "a curiously lopsided film that begins as an unassumingly naturalistic drama, then suddenly waylays the spectator with a third act that is, in succession, hair-raising, annoying, preposterous, and finally enervating.... Kechiche earns a lot of good will in the first part of the film, building a lot of sympathy for Slimane and his family, but his slow implication of the audience in the outrageous fortunes of the final act works against the first half's carefully measured humanity."

"[T]he movie's loose structure - a 20-minute time-out for a massive dinner isn't considered tangential - turns this ensemble piece into something more than a savory family drama," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Whether or not the restaurant opens is beside the point; it's Kechiche's living, breathing portrait of a second-generation immigrant culture that's The Secret of the Grain's real success story."

"Grain recalls Ramin Bahrani's New York miniatures, but while elliptical Bahrani fills in the margins, Kechiche magnifies them," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine. "In 150 minutes, Grain doesn't pack more scenes than a shorter movie, just longer ones: going face-to-face with voluble characters, Kechiche stokes family tension, then simmers it down. You've never seen such a suspenseful meeting with a loan officer; Grain's a naturalist epic from the land of Zola."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice in 2007 and from the UK this June.

Update, 12/25: "The Secret of the Grain is more complicated than it sounds, less geared toward uplift than in revealing the fault-lines within this sprawling, multi-generational family and between their immigrant culture and their French hosts," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Update, 12/27: Steve Erlanger meets Kechiche for the NYT: "He did not want to do 'a movie on some community,' he said. 'It's what's universal in this family that interested me,' he added. 'What I really wanted to describe was a social milieu and a family we can find in all the families of the world: all the secrets, the affections, the heart-wrenchings, the treachery are things we find in every family.'"

Frieze. Jan 09.

"Politics clearly dominated cinema in 2008, and one of the most interesting developments was the emergence of animation as an apt medium to tackle issues such as war and totalitarianism," writes Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy, introducing her list of the best in film for the new issue of frieze. Further down that same page is Die Zeit film critic and editor Katja Nicodemus's overview: "Sitting in the cinema, one sometimes has the wonderful feeling that, even after over 100 years of movie-making history, this art form is still capable of constantly reinventing itself." High up on both lists: Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir.

Alice Twemlow's review of the year in design features a bit of online viewing, a promo for the BBC's coverage of the Beijing Olympics, "a beautiful display of animation gymnastics created by musician Damon Albarn and graphic artist Jamie Hewlett, of the virtual band Gorillaz.... Thanks to the gorgeous art direction, great music and a compelling narrative, the animation is wry and wistful rather than goofy."

The year in art: best biennials and survey shows, group shows and solo shows.

"19th-century microscopy, camera-less film and photography, body-mapping (inside and out), Surrealism and Conceptualism make strange bedfellows, conjoined by the subject of close observation in science and art," writes Michelle Cotton. "Close-Up makes rare connections between material, both contemporary and historical, identifying scientific or pseudo-scientific strategies at play in the formulation of imagery by artists in print and on screen."

Christian Jankowski "has, with increasing frequency, smuggled his productions into existing mass-media formats such as television shows and movies," writes Burkhard Meltzer. "When, for example, German filmmaker Lars Kraume asked to use several ideas from Jankowski's work in the film Viktor Vogel: Commercial Man (2001), the artist cleverly bartered 'ideas for camera time,' allowing him to 'borrow' well-known actors from the existing set and ask them for their views on art (Rosa, 2001).... For the new, drily titled work Dienstbesprechung (Briefing, 2008) Jankowski acted as the mediator of his proposal for individual members of the museum staff to swap roles."

Daniel Trilling and Frances Morgan select the best CDs, reissues and such and "the year's most compelling work in the field of extreme music."

Brooklyn Rail. Dec 08 / Jan 09.

Theodore Hamm explains why the governor of Alaska is Brooklyn Rail's "Person of the Year 2008. Yet the frightening prospect that her book deal, celebrity, and the appeal she holds for her party's base will keep her in the spotlight for years to come is why we must not refer to her by name. We can only hope it is soon forgotten."

Bollywood's "recent trend towards realistic crime films (reflecting the volatile high-crime rate of Mumbai) has ushered in a new wave of Indian cinematic hysteria. Director Apoorva Lakhia, a rising star of this new generation of filmmakers, combines brutal frankness with explosive action." David Wilentz talks with him about Shootout at Lokhandwala.

If you're worried about the state of film criticism, it could be worse. Just ask Dore Ashton.

Williams Cole talks with Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath about Betrayal, "an epic documentary infused with an artistic cinematographer's eye that tells the story of Thavi and his family on their journey from their home in Laos after the turmoil resulting from the US military involvement in that country during the Vietnam War era."

"The latest installment of Che-inspired popular art is veteran cartoonist Spain Rodriguez's Che: A Graphic Biography, a frenetically-paced account of the South American revolutionary's life," writes Nisa Qasi. "Armed with iron-clad principles and an enduring love for the 'little guy,' Ernesto 'Che' Guevara jackboots his way through these pages with the moral urgency of a missionary. But don't be fooled by the title - this Che is every bit the comic-book superhero as Rodriguez's other ass-kicking Marxist, Trashman."

Phong Bui interviews Pipilotti Rist.

Following up on last month's interview with Andrzej Wajda, Alan Lockwood tours the filmmaker's homeland: "While it may be possible to view Poland strictly in its current, robust guise, it's perhaps more instructive and accurate to see it through the layers and ambiguities that resonate everywhere in a nation where such an important portion of its history was annihilated so recently."

"Let the Right One In manages to weave a classically formal coming of age story into the iciest, yet most heartfelt, vampire film in some time," writes Sarahjane Blum.

"Robert Frank, the iconic, influential 20th Century American street photographer/filmmaker, not only questioned and reshaped the photographic style of postwar America, shattering its wholesome image and revealing an honest portrait of American life, he also created one of, if not the greatest, rock and roll films of all time." Mary Hanlon on Cocksucker Blues.

"Slumdog Millionaire gave me the perfect experience of what Roland Barthes calls 'cinematographic hypnosis.'" Lu Chen explains.

"The emotional and physical hardship that a lack of money forces upon someone, and the scattered ambitions that Americans are wooed and then trapped by, form a key aspect of Kelly Reichardt's overarching investigation," writes Camila de Onís. "Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy examine yearnings for independence that are both financial and personal."

Frost/Nixon is "neither an indictment nor an exoneration, but an eloquent exploration of the interplay of personality and power, wants and needs, integrity and ambition," writes Tessa DeCarlo. "It's beautiful, disciplined, consummately well-acted, and unexpectedly moving."

Those familiar with Jon Else's Wonders Are Many may be interested in Ellen Pearlman's take on the Metropolitan Opera's production of John Adams's Doctor Atomic.

Similarly, for Talk to Her fans: Emily Macel on Pina Bausch at BAM.

From David N Meyer, a DVD roundup: Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Deuxieme Souffle, 10 Years of Rialto Pictures and Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep.

Filmmaker Year in Review.

The other day I noted that Peter Bowen was kicking off a series of reflections by Filmmaker editors and contributors. I should have recognized right off that this series would need its own entry.

Updated through 12/24.

Karina Longworth considers the exciting and terrifying developments in independent film that keep her up at night. David Lowery comments - within the context of an entry celebrating the availability of Frank V Ross's Hohokam on DVD.

James Ponsoldt's favorite film of the year is Milk and Noah Harlan wants us to remember Jake Mahaffy's Wellness.

Brandon Harris: "It's becoming clearer and clearer that most people making films with their investors hard earned dollars should start distributing and promoting the films of more gifted filmmakers and building communities everywhere (not just Manhattan and a small sliver of Brooklyn) in which sophisticated film appreciation is a given, not an oddity, instead of indulging their own narcissistic impulses to make their own pictures in order to build a truly sustainable (and diverse) film culture."

Updates: Howard Feinstein's favorites, "in no particular order: Alexandra; The Secret of the Grain; Silent Light; Times and Winds; and Still Life."

"Like many others, I do not think that the films released in 2008 can compare with the embarrassment of riches of 2007, but considering how exceptional last year was for cinema it seems a little unreasonable to complain too much," writes Nick Dawson. "And honestly, how could anyone find fault with a year when exceptional movies like Silent Light and Synecdoche, New York reminded us of the transformative power and almost limitless potential of cinema?"

Updates, 12/24: Alicia van Couvering throws down, Damon Smith lists ten and recalls "three indelible, goose-bump-raising sequences" and Brian Chirls invents a few new categories, e.g., "Best Foreign Film About Food That I Saw at a European Festival Of Which No One I Know In the States Has Ever Heard: Estômago."

iW. Critics Poll 08.

"Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Flight of the Red Balloon topped indieWIRE's annual survey of more than 100 North American film critics," announces editor Eugene Hernandez. "It was named best film of the year and Hou was singled out as best director in a survey of 105 critics." Looks like now would be a good time to go back and revisit Reverse Shot's recent special issue on Hou.

What's interesting about this year's edition of iW's poll - a reincarnation of sorts of the one originally conducted by Dennis Lim for the Village Voice in 1999 - is that the frontrunners have nailed their positions pretty firmly. The point spread seems wider than it is in Film Comment's poll of critics (and hence, probably mentions as well). Here, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale is a clear second, with spot #3 far behind. Thing is, WALL•E and Wendy and Lucy are in a tight tangle for that one.

Topping the list of Two Hundred and Fifty undistributed films is Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman. Anthony Kaufman sorts through the long tail.

As part of the package, a slew of comments from the voters fall under headings such as "Rants on the state of film and film distribution, circa 2008," "Hollywood and politics" and "Feelings and moments to remember."

And finally, a little something to do over the holidays: Browse the individual ballots and sort through the complete results.

DVDs, 12/23.

"Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC, "and I suppose how you measure the attack-mode nuts of David Volach's My Father My Lord (2007) and Özer Kiziltan's Takva: A Man's Fear of God (2006) depends on how strenuously you feel the press of 'extreme tradition' (my phrase!) in your own life. The movies seem from a New Yorker's perspective to go gently, though with firm conviction, for the throat, while in Israel's Haredic communities, and in Turkey's Muslim enclaves, the films might inspire fiery damnations aplenty. Or none at all."

Death Proof is now out in an "extended and unrated" Blu-ray edition and, for the New York Times, Dave Kehr takes a look: "Tarantino resists easy ideological readings, confounding politics with visual pleasure (how beautiful these high-speed chases and slow-motion collisions are) and confounding pleasure with revulsion (and how appalling the consequences, particularly when enhanced, as they are in the unrated version, by some horribly graphic special effects). Zoë - the name of the character as well as of the performer - may represent an ideal of female empowerment, but she's also a domineering figure of male fantasy, right out of a Russ Meyer movie (the 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, to be exact)."

"The movies that came in the immediate temporal wake of Michael Powell's '59 [Peeping Tom] and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, which continuously tested/took advantage of the shifting mores and increasingly permissive production standards of their time, retain a particular, shall we say, charm," writes Glenn Kenny in his "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" for the Auteurs' Notebook. "So it is with Twisted Nerve, a 1968 effort from British filmmaking team Roy and John Boulting."

For Interview, Jason Jude Chan watches the latest round of Blu-ray releases from Criterion; as for The Third Man, "Criterion's transfer approaches the beauty of bygone celluloid - its jaw-dropping richness is like luxurious whole milk after a life of the skimmed stuff." More from Matt Noller in Slant.

Michael Tully offers an overview of Wholphin No. 7 at Hammer to Nail.

DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker, DVD Talk, Mark Kermode (Observer) and PopMatters.

Spanish Cinema Now. 10.

James Van Maanen follows up on earlier dispatches: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

As the director/co-writer (with Tomàs Aragay) of one of my favorite dark ensemble pieces, In the City, Cesc Gay is a filmmaker whose work I'd prefer not to miss. So the belated American debut of his and Aragay's 2006 film Fiction (Ficció), via the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Spanish Cinema Now series, was a must-see that did not disappoint. His life-like pacing (some might call it slow; though for me it's real) results in a gift for capturing the moment - lots of them.

Like In the City, Fiction is another ensemble piece, but more tightly focused on a much smaller ensemble. It tells the story of a filmmaker (the magnetic Eduard Fernández, also seen in this series' Before the Fall) who's gone off to the country to visit old friends and perhaps make some headway on a new script. His host is played by Javier Cámara, whose retrospective (including this film) is one of the highlights of this year's series. The bond between these men and their several friends and relations forms the heart of the movie, particularly one new relationship that develops along the way.

Things happen - some major, some minor - but none of these events are handled in a manner at all similar to how most filmmakers might approach them. We never really know where things are headed, and this is another factor that makes Gay's work so lifelike and surprising. His entire ensemble (including the children, one of them very young) does fine, moment-to-moment work, and his capturing of the beauty of the Spanish mountains and countryside - in sun, shade or storm - is simply beautiful, as are the gorgeous locations. As to the women in the cast, while all give good performances, the meatiest role goes to Montse Germán (also seen in this series' My Prison Yard), and she is very fine indeed.

The ending of the film put me in mind - oddly, I admit - of the wonderful French romantic comedy Shall We Kiss (which is to be released here in 2009 by Music Box Films). The two movies could not be more different in tone or style, yet both come up against one of life's more persistent problems/temptations: how to handle sexual attraction when one or both parties are committed elsewhere. The way in which these two films approach, play with, and resolve this question are so rooted in the culture of each country that they're practically primers on French and Spanish behavior. Which is preferable? I can't imagine living without either. Fiction screens again, Tuesday, December 23 - tonight! - at 8:15 pm.

Last Saturday, SCN offered a rather special program of Avant-Garde Shorts - perhaps a tad more avant-garde than some of us might have wished, since none of these shorts were subtitled. Although this rendered the mid-section of the program relatively worthless for us non-Spanish-speaking listeners, the first and last of the shorts contained almost zero dialogue but some terrific visuals. So, two out of six made the 69 minutes at least bearable.

The program kicked off the a delightful and very early piece of stop-motion visuals called The Electric Hotel (El hotel elctrico) by Segundo de Chomón from 1908, in which husband/wife travelers check into the hotel of the future where one's luggage unpacks itself and much else magically happens to make life easier. Until, as so often occurs with Con Edison and elsewhere, problems with the electricity set in. This "short" short proved a perfect way to begin the afternoon, but then the lack of subtitles took over.

The following four films - Ernesto Giménez Caballero's The Essence of the Fair (Escencia de verbena) from 1930; An Announcement and Five Cards (Un Annuncio y cinco cartas) from 1937 and The Fakir Rodriguez (El fakir Rodriguez) from 1938, both by Enrique Jardiel Poncela; and Sabino Antonio Micón's The Story of a Bottle (Historia de una botella) from 1948 - were all so top-heavy with dialogue that little understanding of what was going on seemed possible.

This left the final film, 1958's Fire in Castillo (Fuego en Castillo) from Jose Val del Omar to carry the torch for the avant-garde. With only perhaps two lines of dialogue but some breathtaking photography, lighting and design centering on the religious sculpture of the city of Valladolid, the movie did more than deliver. Accompanied by a surprisingly contemporary musical score, this almost shocking film managed to introduce something that looked very much like torture porn into the cinematic vocabulary long before the Hostel or Saw franchises, let alone the Bush administration, made it au courant. One could not help but wonder if Mel Gibson managed to view this one before creating his tortured Passion. Simply for the first and final offerings in this program, I'm glad to have braved the winter storm to attend.

Auteurs' Notebook. Writers' poll.

The Auteurs' Notebook is conducting its first annual writers' poll, in which each contributor presents a released-in-the-US top ten, an anything-goes top ten and then they're cut loose: "explanation, rant, annotation, or anything else that occurs to them about their film viewing in 2008." Stepping up to bat so far: Ryland Walker Knight ("my movie years continue to become defined more by the 'old' films I saw rather than the 'new'") and Neil Young (The Wrestler tops both of his lists).

Updated through 12/29.

Update: "[I]t looks to me as if world filmmaking is continuing its long display of strength across a variety of film cultures," writes Dan Sallitt. "Even the American art cinema is showing signs of taking root, and we are seeing the occasional American entertainment film that is successfully inflected by art-film qualities."

Update, 12/25: "For the past several years I've relied on the Berlinale, which takes place in early February, as a gauge of what to expect for the remainder of the year," writes Andrew Grant. "It's been a remarkably accurate instrument thus far, particularly in 2008 which was lackluster at best.... From the arthouse to the multiplex I found myself coddled more than challenged, and I'm convinced we're in the midst of a global will to mediocrity."

Updates, 12/26: "José Luis Guerín's En la ciudad de Sylvia, my favorite film this year, is, among other things, a sort of crystallization of cinema," writes Fernando F Croce. "Not so much Godard's old 'boys taking pictures of girls' definition (though that certainly plays into the film's use of voyeurism), but a distillation of the medium as a synergy of spaces, faces, and emotions. And time."

"Compiling a Top 10 list of films that enjoyed at least a one-week theatrical run in the US offers a frustrating glimpse into the current state of distribution," notes Darren Hughes, who puts Still Life at the top of his.

Updates, 12/29: Edwin Mak: "What strikes me in reviewing my selection is how many entries were touched by the moralistic - only the deliriously entertaining genre twister Sparrow and absurdist wonder that is The Sun Also Rises escape this category - offering one angle on looking back at this year's film."

Vadim Rizov puts A Christmas Tale at the top of his list and then adds "an alphabetical list of 10 terrific older movies I saw in pretty much pristine condition for the first time this year that are shamefully underknown and not available, as of right now, on Region 1 DVD."

Revolutionary Road, round 3.

"Let's put it plain," begins Andrew Tracy in Reverse Shot: "in any sane world, Revolutionary Road would be laughed off as a joyless embarrassment before we moved on to more pressing business. Yet while this latest Oscar-baiting turkey will doubtlessly find its ultimate fate in the critical memory hole, the reason for the season demands that we speak of it as if it deserved serious consideration; as if this is a case of 'flaws' in an otherwise worthy whole. Make no mistake, though: this is folly of a grand order, though any potential glee one might take in skewering it is deflated by the ruthlessly enervating experience of sitting through it."

Updated through 12/27.

Nick Schager, writing in Slant, finds the film to be "a dispiriting bust as both an adaptation and (to a slightly lesser degree) as a standalone film, betraying [Richard] Yates's book in fundamental ways and turning what once stood as a textured parable about the American Dream into a shrill, shallow series of Important Speeches and theatrical histrionics."

"Revolutionary Road is only partially Sirkian," writes the Siren. "Charles Peguy said the only tragedy was not to be a saint; in Revolutionary Road the tragedy is to discover that you are not an artist. Like Sirk, in David Thomson's phrase, 'social decorum smothers love and lovers;' unlike Sirk, in this movie an individual doesn't stand a chance.

"While Yates's depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs's devotees, Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the 'burbs," argues Adelle Waldman in the New Republic. "It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs."

Peter Knegt has a good long talk with Mendes for indieWIRE.

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Updates: Jeffrey M Anderson, writing for Cinematical, finds the film to be "both relentlessly grim and nearly pointless."

"Being that it's at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it's a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. "Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema."

Updates, 12/24: "Revolutionary Road isn't a great movie - it lacks the full, soul-crushing force of the novel - but what works in it works so well, and is so tricky to pull off, that you can't help but admire it," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "By no means an easy candidate for adaptation, Yates dwells in the shadow area between people's conscious and subconscious selves, between the faces they show to the world (and even their spouses) and the ones they see when they look in the bedroom mirror at night. To fully grasp Revolutionary Road is to understand that two people can be at their most alone when they are together - and Mendes, whose American Beauty rendered a similar investigation of suburban anomie as a gallery of over-the-top comic grotesques, willingly goes there. Where the earlier movie was easy to brush off, this one gets under your skin: It is to Mendes's great credit that Revolutionary Road will likely lead to some tense moments between many a young couple on their drive home from the cinema."

"It's a textbook example of a well-crafted movie, beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and structured like an elegant three-act play," writes Dana Stevens in Slate. "So why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?... Maybe this movie's curious emptiness has to do precisely with the actors' appeal, their matinee-scale beauty and charisma."

"Where Road should evoke the slow burn disintegration of romantic idealism," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine, "it instead plays as a series of Actor's Studio sessions in 'lives of quiet desperation' histrionics (then why so loud?), losing detail (a barely-there subplot involving a neighbor smitten with April) and compensating with bombast (Thomas Newman's overbearing score) - compared to, say, Mad Men the action contains little room for devastating subtleties. Some punches land - April's rejection of her husband as 'just some silly boy who made me laugh at a party' - but more frequently they whiff at both universality and resonance, leaving Road as hollow as the Wheelers."

Update, 12/25: "This is a movie about two people in pain; the last thing they need is for Mendes to turn his cool camera on them." Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "But that's all Mendes knows how to do. He's a clinical director, and whatever feeling he puts into a movie is measured out in careful quarter-teaspoon increments. Some people would call that restraint, but I always get the feeling that Mendes, whose background is in the theater, believes deep in his heart that movies are the lesser art form."

"Justin Haythe's unpardonably distilled screenplay 'adaptation' manages to whittle away all that was interesting within Yates's book," writes Ed Champion. "It is, like the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, a dull and literal winnowing of a literary masterpiece.... It's a pity that this film never dares to trust its audience and speed up its pace through natural beats and a meticulous attention to human behavior. If it had, it might have come close to understanding the welcome, thunderous sea of silence at the heart of Yates's novel."

Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "The characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet spend the film screaming about the other's flaws, and I unfortunately found myself agreeing with both of them - both the protagonists are thoroughly mediocre, uninteresting people, and I never figured out why I was supposed to care about the fate of either of them."

"Both director and cast keep the familiar journey intense, but after capturing the death of love in those opening moments, the rest of the film too often feels like a study in dissection," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Michael Ordoña talks with Michael Shannon for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/26: "Revolutionary Road is the kind of great novel that Hollywood tends to botch, because much of it takes place inside the heads of its characters, and because the Wheelers aren't especially likeable and because pessimism without obvious redemption is a tough sell," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's hard to think of many directors who could do it justice: Nicholas Ray, who in films like On Dangerous Ground and In a Lonely Place conveys an intimate acquaintance with twinned despair and self-loathing, might have made it work, and perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson."

"[T]he movie keeps see-sawing between strict fidelity to the book's delusion-busting and Mendes's innate desire to pose his actors as startlingly lifelike mannequins in a Macy's display window, or find the most beautiful possible way of shooting brute ugliness," writes Howard Hampton for Artforum. "When the time comes to stage April's big hemorrhage scene, every shaky footfall is microscopically choreographed, the blood looks to have been measured out with a sterilized eyedropper, and the symbolic stain on her dress is bathed in radiant picture-window sunlight."

Update, 12/27: "Her grandfather was Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), and her parents are screenwriter-directors Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and Robin Swicord (Little Women, Memoirs of a Geisha)." For the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Zoe Kazan, who plays "saucy young secretary Maureen Grube."

Interview. Laurent Cantet.

"The tendency of cinema now is to be more and more connected to reality. If you look at the selection of films at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it was obvious. I think it is because the world in which we are living is more and more complex. It is becoming difficult to find a place in this world where you can ask these questions. Cinema provides a good place to ask these questions."

That's Laurent Cantet, talking with Jonathan Marlow about, among other things, his Palme d'Or-winning film, The Class.

Also talking with Cantet recently: FilmCatcher (video) and Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, New York and just the past few days.

EW. "Best & Worst of 2008."

"Years from now - yea, unto eternity - all who love movies will rank WALL•E among the medium's most profound, subtle, sophisticated, and gorgeously inventive specimens, ever," writes Lisa Schwarzbaum of the film she's put at in the #1 slot in her top ten for Entertainment Weekly's "Best & Worst of 2008" special double issue. Her worst, by the way: The Women.

Owen Glieberman goes for The Wrestler. Darren Aronofsky "strikes a chord of noble-loser heartbreak as surely as the heroes of On the Waterfront or Rocky did." His worst: Speed Racer.

I don't think I've noted yet, though many others have, that Stephen King's put together a pretty ecclectic top ten. His #1: The Dark Knight.

In the "Legacies '08" section: Mel Gibson remembers Heath Ledger, Martin Scorsese on Paul Newman, Rick Moody on David Foster Wallace, Robert Redford on Sydney Pollack, Bob Newhart on Suzanne Pleshette, Brian Williams on Tim Russert, Nigel Lythgoe on Cyd Charisse, Val Kilmer on Charlton Heston, Gene Hackman on Roy Scheider, Bill Maher on George Carlin, Robert "RZA" Diggs on Isaac Hayes, Jude Law on Anthony Minghella, Stephen King on Michael Crichton, Bea Arthur on Estelle Getty, Carol Burnett on Harvey Korman, Pete Townsend on Bo Diddley, Rainn Wilson on Gary Gygax, Joe Haldeman on Arthur C Clarke and Tim Gunn on Yves Saint-Laurent.

Ken Tucker ranks the movie DVDs (#1: The Films of Budd Boetticher) and TV DVDs (#1: Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). His best TV show: The Colbert Report.

Adam Markovitz lists the "Most (and Least) Stylish Movie Characters of 2008" - #1: the cast of Sex and the City - yikes.

The quotes of the year are quick fun, and there's video to go with all of this - which I've spotted via Lane Brown's entry at Vulture, where he notes that the magazine has finally tweaked its parent company's nose for pulling that nasty surprise this summer: moving Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to next summer the day before EW's fall preview issue came out with Daniel Radcliffe on the cover.

Shorts, fests, etc, 12/22.

For Kino!, Neil Young reviews James Benning, "a measured, copiously-illustrated text that combines the scholarly and analytical with the anecdotal and playful as it navigates the reader through Benning's dauntingly large work... Overall it's an unmistakeably enthusiastic paean to Benning and his films. And, as I've more than once described in print Benning as probably the greatest of all living filmmakers, I'm not exactly outraged or dismayed by such a reverent approach - although the writers' enthusiasm does take on a somewhat hagiographic tone after a while."

Also: Christoph Huber talks with Jean-Claude Van Damme about JCVD.

Order of the Exile: Concerning the Films of Jacques Rivette announces a wintertime update: "Just as the holiday season is kicking into full gear, a compact update of vintage Cahiers essays and a suitably wintery addendum to Andreas Volkert's expanding photo essay on Le pont du nord, La rose dans le caniveau: Magic in the streets of Paris. While one could disengenously chalk it up to dumb luck within our editorial pipeline, the pairing of 'The Essential,' 'The Genius of Howard Hawks' and 'Mizoguchi Viewed From Here' hits on a number of interesting threads running through Rivette's critical and filmic body of work."

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image's Focus on William Klein runs from January 22 through February 1. Adrian Martin: "William Klein is a remarkable figure in film history, a law unto himself, ultimately beyond (while overlapping with) many movements and trends." Via Girish.

"Four Oshima features pretend objectivity, each differently; three of them concern artists to undermine it." From a series by David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook:

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is filmed in shaky 16mm as handheld newsreel flipping events every ten or fifteen minutes, but turns out to rhyme sequences in their ritualization: they're all staged. The Man Who Left His Will on Film, done mostly in smoother 16mm, hints at a Borgesian labyrinth in which everyone is being filmed all throughout, the subjects of a documentary we're watching, but demonstrates the censoring Christian's worries more overtly, that people find personal resonance and meaning wherever they look (as in Diary, if every shot is mediated by some invisible presence, the shots not only seem more objective, severed as they are from their subject, but seem more subjective, tied as they are to someone's vision). Dear Summer Sister, which doesn't follow artists beyond the usual Oshima folk singer or two, is breezy travelogue that nevertheless ends up in brisk, Seurat-like abstractions, with a few plastic red accoutrements of civilization (a couple chairs, a tent) planned neatly against a beach as, appropriately and as usual, artificial civilities crumble. And Shiro of Amakusa mounts its camera and militias, clogged in traffic of men, run to battle in congested jog, as the frame slowly yields thousands of men to a single one.

Also: Pleasures of the Flesh is Oshima's "rare 60s foray into simpler pleasures of plotting."

Heinrich Breloer's adaptation of Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, opens in Germany on Thursday. Reviews so far have been, for the most part, lukewarm at best; some, though - e.g., Ekkehard Knörer and Bert Rebhandl in Cargo and Richard Oehmann in Telepolis - are blasting away at Breloer with both barrels.

Lizzy Davies's piece on Buddenbrooks for the Observer is not about the film, but about the event: "Published in 1901, the book is a European classic that charts the rise and precipitate fall of a middle-class merchant family from Lübeck, whose younger generations squander the wealth amassed by their prudent forefathers. No one could have predicted the uncanny timeliness of its revival. The contemporary parallels of the book have undoubtedly struck a chord with a society in the grip of a recession and questioning the values of spendthrift capitalism."

Also: Miranda Sawyer profiles Yoko Ono and Philip French's latest "screen legend" is Gary Cooper.

"[L]ately, when I've sought escape from the daily flood of cultural novelty (and the daily grind of economic bad news) by slipping an old favorite into the DVD player, I've been confronted with a disconcerting jolt of reality." In the New York Times, AO Scott focuses particularly on It's a Wonderful Life, The Grapes of Wrath and Sullivan's Travels. "It was in the 1930s that the movies' hold on the popular imagination solidified and grew, and the marvelous monster known as the 'studio system' took shape. It's easy to forget just how new the cinema still was back then, and how uncertain its fate. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, sound film was younger than YouTube is now.... However much has changed since the 1930s, it still seems that in hard times people go to the movies. But why? To confront their troubles or to escape them? This may be the wrong question and the either/or phrasing too simple."

Also, Lynn Hirschberg profiles Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Magazine.

Stephen Metcalf on Tom Cruise: "I can't name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long.... But note a curious fact about his career: It maps perfectly onto the 25-year bull market in stocks that, like Cruise, is starting to show its age. Nascent in the early 80s, emergent in 1983, dominant in the 90s, suspiciously resilient in the 00s, and, starting in 2005, increasingly prone to alarming meltdowns. For both Cruise and the Dow Jones, more and more leverage is required for less and less performance. Place Cruise next to Nicholson, Newman and Tracy, and he is a riddle. Place him next to Reagan, and he is not so confounding at all."

Also in Slate: Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagan looks back on the life of Jean Shepherd, who wrote and narrated A Christmas Story, focusing particularly on the radio days, spanning from the late 50s to 1977: "He was definitely a grown-up but he was talking to me—I mean straight to me, with my 12-year-old sensibility, as if some version of myself with 25 more years worth of life experience had magically crawled into the radio, sat down, and loosened his tie. I was hooked."

Kevin Lee on Mädchen in Uniform: "The film's once-controversial status as anti-authoritarian, proto-feminist and ultimately pro-lesbian is by now a non-starter; more troubling is the glaring subtext of pedophilia that remains largely unaddressed. All the same, this is a landmark work, blessed by a stylistic rigor that serves its subject matter perfectly."

"Who'd have thought James Bond would make his stateside debut in America's dustbowl?" John McElwee tells the story of the launch of a franchise. Related: Jason Sperb figures Thunderball is the series' all-time box office champ.

"Not only persuasive in its argument, that Victor Fleming was one of the unsung titans of his era, [Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master] also makes for a fascinating case study in how power was acquired, wielded and lost during the 1930s and 40s," writes S James Snyder for Time.

"Algerian director Lyes Salem's Masquerades and Korean/American director So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain took top nods at the Dubai International Film Festival, capping the event's fifth year," reports indieWIRE's Brian Brooks. Related: Fionnuala Halligan for Screen: "Undoubtedly, Masquerades marks Salem out as a talent we'll certainly be seeing more of; and if his next work is as genial as this, the pleasure will be all ours."

The Guardian runs a Reuters story on the quiet, all but under-the-radar return of cinema to Saudi Arabia following a three-decade ban.

Focusing on how Scientology recruits young unemployed actors in Hollywood, Ian Halperin offers a sneak peek at his book Hollywood Undercover in the Independent.

"Korean actor and theater director Park Kwang-jung, who starred in Driving with My Wife's Lover died of lung cancer Dec 15 in Seoul," reports Han Sunhee in Variety. "He was 46."

If you'll be in New York on January 6, you might consider spending 24 hours at the Guggenheim.

Online listening tip. Ambrose Heron talks with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson.

Online viewing tip. David Poland talks with Matteo Garrone about Gomorrah.

Online viewing tips, round 1. A seasonal roundup from the Guardian's Kate Stables features... William S Burroughs?

Online viewing tips, round 2. Danny Boyle and Darren Aronofsky talk shop; and Cinematical points to other, scattered parts of the conversation as well.

Lists and awards, 12/22.

At the top of David Ansen's list for Newsweek: Let the Right One In.

"The 'Cyber-Horror Elite' Have Spoken." Again. Following last month's poll of "32 cyber-horror notables," leading to a list of the "Top 50 Horror Films of All Time!," the Vault of Horror has conducted another: the "Top 25 Horror Films of the Modern Era!," which is to say, since 1990. Via Scott Weinberg, who presents his own ballot of 30 at Cinematical. #1 at the Vault: The Descent. Scott's #1: Let the Right One In.

"Most of the films I found most resonant speak to our times by avoiding the subject." Peter Bowen is the first in a series of Filmmaker editors and contributors to post a list.

"That Was the Year That Was" as it was for Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog: the Tops, Runners-Up, Top Documentaries and Top DVDs.

DVD Savant, whose "interest is purely from the disc collector's point of view," picks the "Most Impressive Discs of 2008." His #1: Criterion's release of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. Earlier: a July roundup.

Ambrose Heron lists the "Best DVDs of 2008" chronologically, as they were released in the UK.

There's a tie at the top of Paul Matwychuk's "list of the 10 best (plus six runners-up)": Happy-Go-Lucky and Synecdoche, New York.

For Tribune, Neil Young lines up a UK top ten and then adds notes on best performances, the under- and overrated, a handful of worsts and "special mentions for the year's best Film Festival Premieres: a trio of masterpieces which delighted audiences at Bradford (programmed by yours truly), Edinburgh and London respectively. Ron Lamothe's The Call of the Wild and Jeon Soo-il's With A Girl of Black Soil remain, depressingly, in distribution-limbo - but Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one of the top half-dozen movies of the decade, is set for UK release in mid-January."

The list of "1000 Greatest Films" at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? "has undergone its annual upgrade. It is now based on 1,825 critics/reviewers' and filmmakers' top-10 lists, culled from many sources. Additionally, we have also factored in over 900 magazine polls, film institute polls, and many other polls of interest. The net effect of all our fine-tuning over the last twelve months is that a total of 96 films have debuted or re-entered our list and, of course, 96 films have dropped out."

Michael Z Newman lists his faves - tunes, imagery, what have you: "And the short version of what follows is: my favorite thing of '07, Mad Men, is also my favorite thing of '08." But like Girish, you'll want to read the long version. Earlier: a July roundup.

"You might reasonably assume from the outside, or even from the inside, that an article about the state of independent film in 2008 is going to be a tale of gloom and woe." But what Salon's Andrew O'Hehir discovers as he talks to Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, Dennis Doros, co-founder of Milestone Films, Marcus Hu, president of Strand Releasing, among others, is that business has actually been pretty good. "If anything, the apparent collapse of the mid-level Indiewood sector has opened up the marketplace for smaller, leaner, cinephile-oriented distributors like Strand, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2009."

You'll remember that AJ Schnack has been interviewing the filmmakers behind some the year's most notable documentaries. His most recent interviewees: Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream) and Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze).

"The sad truth is that 'family movies' have become an anachronism thanks to the fracturing of the modern movie marketplace," writes Mark Kermode in the Observer, where he offers a list of remedies for our fractured times, a family films top ten.

The AV Club lists "42 holiday entertainments that don't make us want to claw our eyes out with rage."

Roger Ebert refries a slew of movies with some of his hottest pans.

Pitchfork takes a leisurely walk through the "50 Best Albums of 2008"; Matt Dentler picks his top 30.

Vince Keenan lists his "Favorite Novels of 2008."

An announcement from Andrew Sullivan: voting for the Daily Dish Awards begins now.

'Tis the season. No one's flush this year, but if the spirit grabs you, do keep Art Fag City in mind.

Online viewing tip. Mark Kermode's best of 2008. His #1: Terence Davies's Of Time and the City.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, round 2.

"David Fincher would seem, in terms of temperament, an unlikely directorial choice for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an era-spanning epic whose sweeping, poignant romance doesn't seem a natural fit for a digital-era auteur whose films are generally typified by cool, sleek, exacting meticulousness," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "And yet that measured, distant disposition is, in fact, what prevents his latest from sliding into the mawkishness for which it so often seems destined."

Paul Matwychuk: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tells an incredible story, and yet I found myself oddly unmoved by any of it, held at arm's length by David Fincher's surprisingly impersonal direction, the overly episodic, narration-heavy script, the fussed-over production design, an opaque central character, and a tiresome framing story set, bewilderingly, in a New Orleans hospital in the hours before Hurricane Katrina. To steal a metaphor from Mad Men, the film is a gold violin: it's beautiful, but it doesn't make any music."

Updated through 12/26.

"For a melodrama concerned with emotional pain, this fairy tale favors formal trickery over human connection to a fault," agrees David Fear in Time Out New York.

Brad Pitt "isn't bad (his noncommittal performance might even appeal to some people, who can project on him what they will), but he lets opportunities slide that other, physically inventive performers would kill for," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It's too bad that I can barely remember the movie after only a week."

"Last year it felt as if I was the only person in the world that disliked Zodiac, and now I feel like the only person in the world - at least in my critical circle - willing to rally behind the flawed but enthralling The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," blogs Ed Gonzalez.

The original story is "a snarky little tale about a man born old who ages backward - that [F Scott] Fitzgerald whipped out, probably mainly for the cash," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "To build a Movie as Big as the Ritz out of such a trifle is only part of the reason why the development of Benjamin Button consumed two decades and involved at least two screenwriters' best efforts, more than a few directors and the patience of producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, as well as former Paramount topper Sherry Lansing, for whom this might represent her last major legacy to the studio she oversaw."

"Although nearly every major Hollywood movie of this size and budget is still made on film, Button, except for some high-speed and underwater sequences, was shot digitally on high-definition Thomson Viper cameras directly to hard drive, without ever touching tape, then captured into Final Cut Pro for editing." Joe Cellini talks tech with Fincher for Apple. Via Movie City News.

The Los Angeles Times profiles Fincher.

Jane Housham offers a quick take on Fitzgerald's story in the Guardian.

Earlier: Round 1.

Update: "In something like the way Fincher's Zodiac, too, was defensibly overlong in order to convey the procedural tedium of investigative police work, this film also uses time as a narrative tool, if only to steep us in wistful awareness of its irrevocable passage," writes Jonathan Kiefer. "It is at once more affecting than its source material and more affected."

Updates, 12/23: "Screenwriter Eric Roth is no doubt hoping that you won't notice how many of his ideas from Forrest Gump have made it into his adaptation," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "And even fans of that earlier film may find themselves overburdened; Gump director Robert Zemeckis isn't exactly known for his light touch, but next to Button man David Fincher, he's practically Ernst Lubitsch."

In Slate, Juliet Lapidos considers Fitzgerald's decision to send Benjamin Button to Harvard.

"This technically dazzling, decades-spanning fable is a more tenderhearted reflection on humanity than Fincher has allowed himself before," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "Whether it leaves you enchanted or indifferent may prove a matter of taste. But it's a fascinating and accomplished gamble that again asserts Fincher as a major talent whose limits are still unknown."

"Rendered with make-up and motion-capture technology, the man-child Benjamin is a technical and expressive miracle. (Between him and WALL•E, two of the most affecting movie characters of the past year were CG creations.)" Elbert Ventura in Reverse Shot: "The premise also makes us more attuned to the development of personality. As he grows older, Benjamin develops an appealing wryness and wary alertness, even as he retains a cautious detachment bred by years of being different. Passive yet affecting, Pitt's performance may be his best non-comic turn yet.... The movie itself is a curious case: What to make of a movie of equal parts beauty and banality, imagination and hokum? Fincher's captivating spell lingers after the movie's done—but the disappointment of what could have been lingers longer."

Updates, 12/24: "[W]here Gump actively trivialized history," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice, "Benjamin Button effectively ignores it: Although Benjamin briefly exchanges fire with a German submarine during World War II, and Hurricane Katrina makes a cameo toward the end, this movie about a white baby raised by a black adoptive mother during the inglorious years of the Jim Crow South never so much as addresses race once.... It was just last year that Fincher delivered a great film, also three hours, on the subject of time. But whereas in Zodiac the passing years wrap around the characters like a vise, catching them up obsessively in a single, distended moment, in Benjamin Button the ravages of time are trumped by a kind of eternal, undying love that mere physics is at a loss to contain. And Fincher, try as he might, scarcely seems able to buy into Roth's brand of Harlequin-romance hokum."

"You make allowances for the odd Gumpy screenplayism because of Fincher's intensity, the exquisite production design, and the film's tidal tugs," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine: "besides the imperfections of love, there's the reversal of roles with loved ones over the years, the counterpoints with youthful America (across two postwars), even Pitt's own flickering star. Bonus: ideal as a double feature with Coppola's Youth Without Youth."

"At its best, it is evocative and affecting," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr; "at its worst, an exercise in sentimental portraiture - and the line between the two tendencies is not always a clear one."

"This vision of two lives criss-crossing as they ebb finally achieves a profundity the rest of the movie strains for, but it comes about two hours and 25 minutes too late," finds Dana Stevens in Slate.

"May I be permitted to retitle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as The Mystifying Multimillion-Dollar A-Listing Exercise of Destroying an Intriguing if Minor F Scott Fitzgerald Short Story with Oscar-Caliber Sentimentality?" asks Kimberly Chun in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Updates, 12/25: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, more than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist's condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate - in consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways - are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love."

"Maybe what's most affecting in Benjamin Button has less to do with the story or the acting than with watching a filmmaker stretch in a new direction, trying things he isn't fully comfortable with and doesn't exactly know how to pull off," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Nothing in Benjamin Button happens casually or without a reason. And maybe that's why, even though it offers us much to marvel over, it sparks little magic: The effect, ultimately, is one of applied whimsy."

"[W]hen all the dazzling visuals have subsided, when audiences are left with the movie's tagline ringing mawkishly in their ears and puzzled thoughts about what they just saw, they might be forgiven for concluding that they didn't see much of anything," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post.

"Zen gives us the parable of the master who points to the moon, and the student who looks at the master's finger," writes James Rocchi in Cinematical. "Fincher, Roth, Pitt and Blanchett have all, in their way, made a film of true sincerity and (ironically enough in light of its technical achievements) real simplicity; resting your gaze on the film, without directing it onto the things it encourages you to look at, seems like staring at the pointing finger."

"At times, particularly in the film's unavoidably heart-tugging final hour, Fincher's visual mastery and Pitt's charisma almost compensate for a gimmick in search of a meaning," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"Though Hollywood suits have been trying to make it for decades," notes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not a project that cries out to be filmed. Now that it's finally been turned into a major motion picture, complete with megawatt stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, you have to wonder why everyone bothered."

Updates, 12/26: "The movie's premise devalues any relationship, makes futile any friendship or romance, and spits, not into the face of destiny, but backward into the maw of time," argues Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "According to the oddsmakers at Movie City News, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is third among the top five favorites for best picture. It may very well win. It expends Oscar-worthy talents on an off-putting gimmick. I can't imagine many people wanting to see the movie twice. There was another film this year that isn't in the 'top five,' or listed among the front-runners at all, and it's a profound consideration of the process of living and aging. That's Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. It will be viewed and valued decades from now. You mark my words."

"I suspect I already prefer it to all of Fincher's other films, with the possible exception of Se7en," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. "It took me a while to warm to the weird premise and some of the grotesqueries it involves, but I think part of what impresses me is how nervy it is in playing out the poetry of the conceit for all that it's worth and letting all the social-historical elements - from two world wars to Hurricane Katrina (and not overlooking the degree to which it sidesteps all the racial issues) - take a back seat to the love story."

"The charge commonly leveled against Fincher (especially with last year's almost sociopathically chilly Zodiac) is that he lacks heart," writes Paul Constant in the Stranger. "This isn't a capital crime for a director, of course: Stanley Kubrick did just fine without any messy sentimentality getting in the way. Benjamin Button feels as though Fincher is swaddling himself in sentimentality and homespun wisdom to prove his humanity. It's an awkward, unconvincing fit."

"Pitt is the film's calm center, and he brings more nuance than one might think possible to a character living an unimaginable life," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "Blanchett is perfect as always, despite the thanklessness of the role."

Reed Johnson profiles Pitt for the LAT.

Robert Mulligan, 1925 - 2008.

"Robert Mulligan, who was nominated for an Academy Award for directing the 1962 film classic To Kill a Mockingbird died Saturday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 83.... His first film, Fear Strikes Out, was released in 1957 and told the story of mentally ill baseball player Jimmy Piersall, played by Anthony Perkins. Mulligan directed 19 more films, including Summer of '42, The Other and Same Time, Next Year before capping his career in 1991 with Man in the Moon, featuring actress Reese Witherspoon in her movie debut.

Claire Noland, Los Angeles Times, via Dave Kehr.

Updated through 12/23.

[To Kill a Mockingbird] - which won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact.... But the director's heart, here as in so many of his films, was with the Finch children. If Mulligan had an abiding interest, it was troubled youngsters on the cusp of discovering themselves by confronting the world around them."

Richard Corliss, Time.

See also: The January 2005 special issue of the Film Journal devoted to Robert Mulligan.

Update: "The director worked in just about every genre except the epic - what links all his films together is a kind of intimacy, achieved largely via a camera that seeks to establish a strong link between the viewer and a particular character," writes Glenn Kenny.

Updates, 12/22: Flickhead on Summer of '42: "It may not be Mulligan's best film - it may not even be that good a film at all, to some people. But I'll be forever in Mulligan's debt for all it contains, especially Michel Legrand's music."

Phil Nugent in Screengrab on Mockingbird: "The project could have easily ended in disaster, but instead it wound up as one of those movies now seems to have been made for the express purpose of showing up on AFI lists" and gave Peck "a Lincolnesque aura for the rest of his life and career. The movie is also notable for including the screen debut of Robert Duvall as the brain-damaged redneck boogeyman Boo Radley, a character that Duvall, lucky for him, was able to step away from in later roles."

Edward Copeland on Same Time, Next Year: "[E]ven now, decades after I first saw it, if I catch it on TV, I have to watch it until the end."

"Though best noted for his country credits he never left the city far behind," writes Robert Cashill: "1960's The Rat Race, with Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds slumming for showbiz work, 1963's Love with the Proper Stranger, with Steve McQueen trying to do the right thing by Natalie Wood as she considers an abortion, the frank teacher saga Up the Down Staircase (1967), and the lusty Bloodbrothers (1978), with Richard Gere in an early part and Marilu Henner as the self-admitted 'town pump,' all poke at the teeming underbelly of Big Apple life."

"Robert Mulligan will probably not be remembered for his discernible visual style," writes Scott Marks. "His films may all look different, but there is a consistency of themes that make him an unmistakable auteur."

Update, 12/23: "Mulligan was one of the new wave of American moviemakers who emerged from the heyday of postwar television, enjoying initial acclaim but erratic subsequent careers," writes Brian Baxter in the Guardian. "Together with Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, John Frankenheimer and others, he maintained an uneasy balance between commercialism and personal works, often missing out on critical attention."

"If some critics took Mr. Mulligan to task for lacking a strong or consistent directorial vision, others praised his narrative ability and his fealty to the source material of his films," notes Margalit Fox in the New York Times.

Shorts, fests, etc, 12/20.

For Artforum, Lauren O'Neill-Butler previews a series of films Ken Jacobs shot in the late 50s and early 60s featuring Jack Smith; Jacobs will be on hand at the Anthology Film Archives tonight for the second and final round of screenings. More from the L Magazine's Mark Asch and a lot more from Reverse Shot's mjr.

The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club is well and truly established now.

The lineup's set for Berlin & Beyond: New Films From Germany, Austria & Switzerland, running January 15 through 21 in San Francisco, and Michael Hawley takes a look.

The Berlinale announces the first six titles in its Perspektive Deutsches Kino program, plus: "29 of its total 49 screens are being equipped with digital cinema servers for the upcoming festival."

"F Scott Fitzgerald's seminal novel The Great Gatsby may have been describing the iniquities of the Jazz Age just before the country slid into the Great Depression but the award-winning Australian director, Baz Luhrmann, yesterday said Fitzgerald's story resonated with the economic excesses of today," reports Arifa Akbar in the Independent. "So much so, that he is set to make a modern version of the novel, which will allude to the present financial crisis that has brought to a grinding halt the bling-laden consumer culture that was spawned in the 1980s and 1990s."

"I am about to make a statement about ethnic Catholicism and if you don't like what I'm saying I'm ready to accept your challenge to step outside." Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt in the Daily Beast on Doubt: "Here's the statement: Had this film been set in an Italian parish setting in the Bronx, or anywhere else, it would have been a different story. [John Patrick] Shanley has written about Italians (Moonstruck) and he knows their priorities: drink your wine, eat your pasta, make love to your wife or anyone's wife and if there is a hell, well, what the hell. The Irish? That's another story, and Doubt limns the particular joylessness of Irish Catholicism." Related: Michael Guillén talks with Viola Davis.

Marshall Fine prompts another one of those must-read entries from Phil Nugent.

"I don't know if Sidney Lumet ever read the work of the architectural critic Ian Nairn - given that Roger Ebert is a fan, it's not too unlikely - but his 1972 film The Offence seems to pick up on one of his critiques of the post-war New Towns." Owen Hatherley elaborates.

"Two surprises lie in store in a viewing of A Cottage on Dartmoor," writes Ian Johnston at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "One is the discovery that an unknown British silent film (to me) should prove to be such a delight, a finely-crafted and visually inventive example of silent cinema at its height. The other surprise is that this should be the work of Anthony Asquith, the son of a British Prime Minister (as everyone likes to mention, in order to stress his upper-class origins) who is known today as a solid practitioner of mainstream products from the days when Britain actually had a properly functioning film industry."

The Tale of Despereaux "is a pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.. "The main difference between the source and its adaptation is that while the book exudes charm, the movie leans toward cute, a substitution that largely speaks to the influence of Disney on animation." More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Robert Horton (Herald), David Jenkins (Time Out), Anna King (Time Out New York), Sheri Linden (Los Angeles Times), Peter Martin (Cinematical), Tim Robey (Telegraph) and Tasha Robinson (AV Club).

"Perhaps the best thing that can be said about My Name Is Bruce is that Bruce Campbell has in fact appeared in worse movies," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, where Gina McIntyre talks with him. Campbell, that is. Also, Kenneth Turan on Gomorrah, "a vividly panoramic film about a pitiless world of criminality."

Britain's Independent: "Sir Ian McKellen's performances in Shakespeare's tragedies will be a highlight of Christmas television this year. So why does he get no pleasure from watching them?"

In the Guardian, Marina Hyde tosses off a few good laughs in the face of Tom Cruise and Valkyrie; Nicole Kidman and Australia; and "Nunchuk Holmes: A Guy Ritchie Movie."

Dennis Perrin looks back on SNL: The Complete Fourth Season: "Gilda Radner performed at an inspired level, her comedic gifts shining in sketch after sketch. She remains perhaps the most natural cast member SNL ever featured (along with Eddie Murphy), and no matter the material or character, Gilda made it work and work well. There's a warm energy to her performances, even when she played Candy Slice, the drunk, drugged out punk singer based loosely on Patti Smith. Candy Slice is rude, obnoxious, barely cogent, yet in Gilda's hands, she's also vulnerable and somewhat sweet. It's as if Judy Miller, Gilda's energetic little girl character, grew up to become queen of CBGB."

Online viewing tip #1. Sujewa Ekanayake posts the first nine minutes of his doc-in-progress, Indie Film Blogger Road Trip.

Online viewing tip #2. David Phelps has the trailer for Three Resurrected Drunkards in the Auteurs' Notebook.

Online viewing tip #3. A promo spot from Jamie Stuart: "Production Designer Bill Groom on Making Milk's San Francisco Real."

Online viewing tips. "As masterful as Frank Langella's performance is in Frost/Nixon, powerfully capturing the former president's shabby grandeur, his Richard Nixon is a shadow of the real thing. Or more accurately perhaps, it is the shadow of a shadow." David Schwartz, Chief Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Living Room Candidate, elaborates - and illustrates with clips.

Lists and awards, 12/20.

"The Guardian First Film award became a titanic struggle between Control, Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic, and the eventual winner, Unrelated, directed by Joanna Hogg," reports Andrew Pulver. Earlier: A round of reviews in September.

"Blind Sunflowers, Jose Luis Cuerda's film adaptation of the Alberto Méndez novel, has received 15 nominations for the 23rd Goya Awards, the Academy of Arts and Cinematic Sciences of Spain announced this morning." Vitor Pinto for Cineuropa: "Spain's Oscar entry will also compete in the main categories - including Best Film, Director, Actor (Raúl Arévalo) and Actress (Maribel Verdú)." Earlier: James Van Maanen on the film's recent screenings in the Spanish Cinema Now series.

For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps and Kat Ekrami asks the likes of Danny Boyle, Gurinder Chadha, Ken Loach and many others to talk a bit about their favorite films of the year.

IFC's gathered all their lists in one big entry and, as it happens, both Matt Singer and Michael Atkinson have placed Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg in their #1 spot. Alison Willmore goes for Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, "one of the few [films of this year] that felt truly electric, the dysfunctional family gathering chestnut filtered through an insanely cinematic prism, a far richer, larger-than-life Gallic one-upping of [Jonathan] Demme's uneven and staunchly naturalistic Rachel Getting Married."

Time Out London film critics each name three "Films of the Year," the "Best Film Without Distribution," the "Worst Film of the Year" and the "Reissue of the Year."

Ryan Gilbey looks back on 2008 and ahead to 2009 for the New Statesman.

Few will be surprised to find Synecdoche, New York in the #1 spot on Andrew Grant's list, but there may be a surprise or two in the remaining nine.

Another #1er for Synecdoche: MSNBC's Alonso Duralde.

Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light tops M Leary's ten.

Jürgen Fauth puts Steven Soderbergh's Che at the top of his list.

Anne Thompson's #1: Andrew Stanton's WALL•E.

Roger Ebert lists the "year's best foreign films (I hope they play in your state)."

The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan: "[W]hile slots two to 10 will be listed alphabetically, I'm going to depart from my usual practice and name a clear No. 1 film: Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionaire."

Added to the Awards Scoreboard at Movie City News: the Las Vegas Film Critics (Frost/Nixon) and the Florida Film Critics (Slumdog Millionaire).

The Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu and Tim Robey put Kung Fu Panda at the top of their list: "It's this year's Ratatouille." Also: best performances, best lines, ten casting catastrophes and the ten worst films of the year. In that category, the London Times goes a little overboard, listing the "100 Worst Movies of 2008."

The Evening Standard rounds up the "Best DVDs of 2008."

The latest quiz at the Guardian: "Have you been paying attention to the world of film in 2008?"

Jim Emerson lists the "Dogs of the Year." No, seriously - actual canines. With pix.

Thom Powers, programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival and the Stranger Than Fiction series: "In an effort to add some variety to the deluge of 'best film' lists, I've approached the exercise a bit differently. In chronological order, here are my favorite personal documentary memories from the year..."

Andy Horbal keeps "a copy of the '100 Greatest Films I've Never Seen' handy for those times when I don't know what I want to watch." And he shows us his "current Top 10."

Ed Howard lists the "best films of the 1980s."

Movie Morlock Richard Harland Smith presents "12 movies to get you through the Holidays!"

Blake Ethridge looks back on a year of wallpapering our desktops.

"Nearly every movie with dreams of Oscar has a publicist - or several publicists - making its case not to audiences, but to the 6000-plus members of the Academy, as well as various guilds, and anybody else who hands out prizes in the Hollywood awards firmament. Sure, every movie studio has publicists, but these independent awards publicists are specifically brought in to turn celluloid into gold." Dan Kois reports in the Washington Post on what it is they do, exactly. Via MCN.

Online scrolling tip. The Big Picture's "2008, the year in photographs (part 3 of 3). Earlier: parts 1 and 2.

Online listening tip. Nathan Lee: "For the second part of my critics roundtable with Melissa Anderson, film editor of Time Out New York, and AO Scott, film critic of the New York Times, we start with a discussion of Momma's Man, Azazel Jacobs' touching micro-indie about a young man caught up in the mysterious gravity of his parent's life and legacy." Earlier: Part 1.

Online viewing tip. David Carr talks with the New York Times' Manohla Dargis and AO Scott about how much or how little influence on the Oscar race they might have.

Spanish Cinema Now. 9.

James Van Maanen, who's just posted an interview with Mar Flores, Félix Sabroso and Dunia Ayaso of Rated-R, has a recommendation for you. And there's only more more screening for this one, too: tomorrow evening.

Isn't there something just too juicy for words about women-in-prison movies? God, the opportunities for camp, melodrama, hot lesbian sex, and, well, you fill in the other thrills. After you've done the filling, watch My Prison Yard (El Patio de mi Cârcel), which will screen again at NYC's Walter Reade Theater this Sunday, and be thoroughly chastened. Here's another film making its debut late in the Spanish Cinema Now series, like Suso's Tower, that is so completely humane and honest that it effortlessly wipes the floor with many of the movies that have preceded it. (And, yes, it does offer some violence and lesbian sex.)

My Prison Yard, from director/co-writer (with Arantxa Cuesta) Belén Macias, most reminded me of the 2005 American documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, which dealt with a special theater production program using male inmates of a Kentucky prison. Macias's movie, as did last year's SCN offering Septembers by Carlos Bosch, deals with a women's prison and the positive uses of performing. Opening with a bank robbery gone bad (in a manner as peculiar as it is believable), Ms Macias tracks the prison life of one of the two robbers (Verónica Echegui, from this year's My Father's House), along with that of maybe a dozen other prisoners, some of the guards, and the prison warden. There are no heroes here, except perhaps one of the prison workers, beautifully played by the amazing Candela Peña (Princesas, Torremolinos 73 and this year's Rated-R), who organizes a theater workshop in which the inmates can perform. There are no villains here, either. Both prisoners and guards have their problems and peculiarities, but no one goes beyond the bounds of believable behavior, as violent as things sometimes become.

The through-line of the movie is exemplary. Exposition is buried within dialogue that's crisp and real; scenes are generally short but bursting with information and life. In 99 minutes, including credits, we live along with a group of characters we come to understand and care for immensely. Also in the fine cast are Raúl Arévalo (Blind Sunflowers), Nuria Mencia (La Soledad) and Ana Wagener (Rated-R). The end credits tell us that the film is based loosely on an actual prison theater workshop. Actual or not, it hardly matters, as the movie offers all the reality we need. As in life, things don't work out for everyone, and the tears you may shed by the end (for both the living and the dead) are earned. My Prison Yard is the only film I've attended in the series so far that produced spontaneous applause from the sparse crowd in attendance. Catch the next (and last) screening - Sunday, December 21, at 6:10 pm - if you possibly can because, as with so many of the movies brought to us by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, you never know when you may have the opportunity to see them again.

Books, 12/20.

"Now that [Christopher] Plummer has published In Spite of Myself: A Memoir," writes Alex Witchell for the New York Times Book Review, "it is the most welcome of surprises to discover that this actor writes and reports almost as well as he acts.... [F]or anyone who loves, loves, loves the theater, not to mention the vanished New York of the 1950s and 60s, [this] is a finely observed, deeply felt (and deeply dishy) time-traveling escape worthy of a long stormy weekend."

"[M]y interest in the screen career of Susan Strasberg inspired me to finally acquire copies of her two books, Bittersweet and Marilyn and Me, both works of autobiography." Tim Lucas: "I've read them both now and, while I was very pleased to discover that the personality captured in these capably written books was bright and resourceful and good company, it was disconcerting to find out how frustrated, unhappy and tense she was for so much of her short life. These books make the reader want to reach out to comfort someone who is no longer there."

"Reading Stefan Kanfer's excellent new biography of Marlon Brando, Somebody, reminds me of one adventure that isn't there: my own trying to secure Brando's memoir for Random House during my time as president and publisher." Harold Evans in the Daily Beast.

The Guardian offers a quick roundup of reviews of Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller and Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking - and Chris Petit races through a roundup of his own: Kanfer's Somebody, Tony Curtis's American Prince, Dennis McDougal's Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times, Michael Deeley's Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies, Roger Moore's My Word is My Bond and Sinclair McKay's The Man with the Golden Touch: How the Bond Films Conquered the World.

A "case can be made that San Francisco, that foggy, Spanish-flavored city by the sea, is perhaps the ultimate noir town, and that argument has been argued convincingly by Nathaniel Rich in San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present, a fascinating piece of scholarship that is as much travel book as film essay." Scott Macaulay talks with Rich for FilmInFocus.

Walter Addiego on Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master: "Where the book really sings is in [Michael] Sragow's enterprising descriptions of movies and scenes. These are inspired segments where his writing is reminiscent of his capsule reviews that still appear in the New Yorker." Also in the San Francisco Chronicle: lists of the 50 best nonfiction and fiction and poetry and "Notable Bay Area" books of 2008.

Boyd Tonkin and Katy Guest pick the "20 best books of the year" for the Independent, where Susie Boyt reviews "an enchanting coming-of-age story," Robert Kaplow's Me and Orson Welles without mentioning that Richard Linklater has filmed an adaptation.

Ian Irvine picks the New Statesman's "Books of the Year 2008."

The London Times' "books of the year" package is kinda huge.

NYT. "The Year in Culture."

"At the risk of sounding stoned on hope, I offer the following heresy: The movies are fine. Sometimes they're great; occasionally they're magnificent." Opening with an exchange from Happy-Go-Lucky, which appears on both her and AO Scott's list of the "Top Movies of 2008," and then listing many of the reasons to be concerned about the state of the art, Manohla Dargis tries on something new: "There is, of course, perverse pleasure in ending the year with an angry rant, as I have proven in the past, if only to myself. But given the clanging of so much bad news, I thought I would try a change of pace. I'm not sure if optimism becomes me, but it sure feels nice."

Particularly within the context of her piece and the two critics' conversation (podcast) that accompanies the New York Times' big "Year in Culture" package - in which they spontaneously decide that "hope" is the word of the year - this position really isn't as pollyannaish at it might at first seem.

AO Scott whittles his list of ten down to movies that "are not all expressions of optimism, but they are all about the obligations, responsibilities and accidents that bind people together, within and across formally constituted families and communities. And they are also about the refusal to give up, to give in to darkness or despair." And earlier, discussing some of the box office superheroes and awards season hopefuls, he notes that "somehow all this messianism and overblown superheroism rings false, both within individual films and out here in the rumpled, stressed-out, hopeful, uneasy world where movies live. Who will save us? Whom should we kill? These don't strike me as the most useful questions right now, and they are generally not the kind posed by the films I found most challenging and interesting this year, which in general were less concerned with moral abstractions than with ethical predicaments."

"In a disappointing year for serious American movies, two television series, AMC's Mad Men and Showtime's Brotherhood, far outshone in truthfulness and complexity most of what American filmmakers created for the big screen," begins Stephen Holden, who tops his list with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Onward.

Continuity. That's what I want to emphasize first and foremost as I carry on blogging solid right here at GreenCine Daily, on through December 31. Then, without skipping a beat, I'll carry on blogging solid, starting on January 1, at IFC.com. (My blog at IFC will be here.) Of course, over the holidays, things may be a little quieter news-wise, but I'm sure the year-end lists will keep on coming, and I'll be on top of them.

Naturally, the blog will keep on evolving. Thinking back over the five and a half years I've been at this, I remember, for example, that I began, for whatever reason, with a "no reviews" policy. News, think pieces, new issues of film journals, the works - just no reviews. Eventually, of course, I realized that it's often in reviews that critics stake out positions, start and finish off arguments, or even crack their best jokes. Now entries on current releases and revivals in theaters, on DVD or elsewhere are an essential part of the constant flow.

So where's that flow flowing? I would guess that, in the long run, as we become just as proficient with our video and audio editing programs as we have been with our text editing programs, there'll be a lot more online viewing and listening to point to. In the short run, we'll keep experimenting with the still relatively new means of publishing available to just about everyone. Fads (e.g., Blog-a-Thons) will come and go, but community-building - the very core of the Internet since long, long before there was such a thing as the World Wide Web - will go on thriving, whether we call it social networking, Web 2.0 or whatever else the marketeers dream up for us in the future.

Keep an eye on GreenCine Daily. It'll be rebooting in 2009 with Aaron Hillis at the helm (more on that shortly) and I'm excited about some of the ideas in the works. Meantime, happy holidays, everybody. Me, I've gotta get back to work.

Moscow, Belgium.

"Charming comedies about unlikely romances ship out of Hollywood like genetically modified soybeans, so it seems a little unnecessary to import them here, as well," writes Leo Goldsmith at indieWIRE. "Moscow, Belgium, a fleet-footed May-December comedy that won hearts at Cannes Critics' Week and the European Film Awards, may seem unnecessary (but then again, Belgium has defied the odds before - this is the country that gave us Jean-Claude Van Damme when we least needed another hero). The film has no name-stars (Barbara Sarafian's only big credit is Peter Greenaway's 8½ Women), a no name-director (most of director Christophe Van Rompaey's prior credits are in Belgian TV), and a decidedly un-picturesque setting in the titular working-class Ghent neighborhood. But, damn it, the film is charming - and most likely this is due to its very lack of these and other qualities most commonly associated with Hollywood's iterations of the genre."

"The clichés are firmly in place, no question," concedes Nicolas Rapold in the Voice, but "Moscow, Belgium leaves you feeling less offended and dirty-feeling than the evidence suggests."

"The movie's steady attention to detail lends it a texture rarely found in films about domestic life," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Its eye and ear for the particular and for what is left unsaid in tense conversation is unerring.... Here and there, especially in a recurrent post office motif, Moscow, Belgium is too tidy. But even then it is psychologically accurate."

"[T]he copious flaws smack of pure Hollywood drivel," finds Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant. "Of course, independent near-masterpieces have been forged with even less attractive raw material, but the triteness of Moscow, Belgium seeps through from macro to micro, leaving no detail untouched."

It's a Wonderful Life in 2008.

When I saw it for the first time in the early 80s, evidently around the same time Wendell Jamieson did, I was already a convert to Hollywood's classic era, but the friends I sat with in that Austin theater were most definitely not. They were there because it was assigned viewing, and they weren't happy about it. These were still the days when one sided with the rebels against the remnants of the old studio system. But what a watershed, Road to Damascus experience that night turned out to be; none of us left the theater with dry eyes.

Updated through 12/24.

"It's a Wonderful Life is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams," writes Jamieson in the New York Times, "of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife.... I haven't seen it on a movie screen since that first time, but on Friday it begins its annual pre-Christmas run at the IFC Cinema in Greenwich Village. I plan to take my 9-year-old son and my father, who has never seen it the whole way through because he thinks it's too corny. How wrong he is."

Rob Christopher will be watching it in Chicago, Joe Leydon in Houston, where he'll be seeing it on the big screen for the first time. Lucky man - take a look at the bank run scene in "high quality" for a taste of what's in store for Joe.

Rob Mackie has a brief note on the DVD in today's Guardian.

Earlier: AO Scott in the NYT; and much earlier, last year's "It's a Wonderful Blog-a-Thon" and the 2006 entry.

Update, 12/21: "[T]he film asks us to consider how family, community, duty and responsibility to one's fellow human beings is what characterises a person's worth," writes David Wilson for the Guardian. "Not piety or religious observance, but the struggle with the mundane and the banal, and the desire to create a self in the ordinariness and chaos of the practicalities of the everyday. I watch It's A Wonderful Life every year because that message needs to be repeated - time after time - and certainly just as often as Come All Ye Faithful, for it is that message that reminds us to do what we can to make this world a better place, rather than accepting our lot and waiting for God."

Update, 12/23: "Entire books have been written about It's a Wonderful Life," notes Leonard Pierce in Screengrab, "But one thing worth mentioning is that how terrifically effective the entire cast is: at a time when the star system was in full swing, Capra and his collaborators (which included script doctors in the uncredited form of Clifford Odets and Dalton Trumbo) populated Bedford Falls with an entire star system of great actors and actresses, many of them character types who gave the performances of their careers in the film. The entire cast seems to take their acting cues from the oversized yet surprisingly natural performance of Jimmy Stewart, who had to be talked into playing the role - his first since returning from a traumatic tour of duty in WWII."

Update, 12/24: For the Guardian, Paul Rennie takes a long look at the poster.

Film Comment. Top 20s.

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy rises to the top of one of the most illustrious polls conducted each year. The filmlinc blog is offering a sneak peak at the results of Film Comment's new poll of critics: the top 20 films that saw a release in the US in 2008; the top 20 that didn't (Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman is the clear frontrunner here); and the list of participants (quite an honor roll).

Back to that first top 20: Interesting to see how tight the race is among the top five. Following Wendy are Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Andrew Stanton's WALL•E and Jia Zhangke's Still Life.

Shorts, 12/18.

"On 22 December 1933, RKO released Flying Down to Rio and introduced the world to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers," writes David Parkinson in FilmInFocus. "They only danced together for a couple of minutes. But audiences instantly recognized their unique chemistry and, 75 years later, they are still the most iconic dance team in screen history."

Murnau, Borzage and Fox "might be the most lavish, cinema-worshipful video package ever assembled, situating 12 features, two lost-film "reconstructions," and a dissertation's worth of scholarship in the kind of expansive gift case you expect for a champagne cognac," writes Michael Atkinson in Moving Image Source. William Fox "could be said to have passionately conceived, through Murnau, a new American Expressionism, romantic and natural where the German version had been so grim and architectural. For a few years, he succeeded. Murnau may be seen as the presiding seminal force in this scenario, but clearly the hero of the era was Borzage, who took the dreamy, multilayered Sunrise palette and infused it with human complexity and romantic seriousness."

"The rap against Victor Fleming and John Sturges is that they were competent and perhaps even skilled directors who lacked the imagination and grace that elevates craftsmen into artists," writes Michael Fox at SF360. "Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master and Glenn Lovell's Escape Artist: The Life and Times of John Sturges, both splendid new biographies by film critics with local ties, expressly aim to reestablish their subjects' reputations. They hit that mark with varying success, but provide so much pleasure for even a casual moviegoer that it scarcely matters."

"It's vexing that Sebastian was yanked from [Michael] Powell's grip, because it would have been his second big collaboration with Leo Marks, who wrote Peeping Tom," writes David Cairns in the Auteurs' Notebook. "In the event, Powell had Marks's sprawling script rewritten by Gerald Vaughan Hughes, before his own ejection from the director's chair. Although producing was not really Powell's forte, he did get the script developed to near-perfection. One of Sebastian's great pleasures is the acreage of skewed dialogue."

Films in Review runs William K Everson's 1974 piece on the film preservation program at 20th Century Fox.

David Bordwell on Ashes of Time Redux: Wong Kar-wai "seems to have taken to heart his central theme of the transient moment, the fact that love can be extinguished at any instant. So why not change your films to match your mood today? Further, like Warhol, he seems to enjoy prodigality for its own sake."

Daniel Frampton, author of Filmosophy, "has also come to be of those (nowadays) very rare authors who have succeeded in founding a significant school of thought," writes Catherine Grant, who presents "some hot, hot, hot filmosophical links."

For the LA Weekly "Holiday Film 2008" package, Scott Foundas interviews Clint Eastwood, who "will allow that, more often than not, those people he chooses to visit are haunted figures with dark and even dangerous pasts, men who have done or witnessed things no man should do or see." Related: Karina Longworth finds Gran Torino to be "most fun when it's working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic's one-man show."

Also in LA Weekly:

• As My Name Is Bruce hits the west coast, Luke Y Thompson meets Bruce Campbell. More from Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: [I]t's hard not to see a little bit of Evil Dead's cocky Ash in all of Campbell's roles. Campbell knows this. After two decades, he's used to it." Michael Guillén talks with Campbell, too.

• Chuck Wilson talks with Paul Schrader and Jeff Goldblum about Adam Resurrected. Related: There's a Schrader entry going on at the moment.

• And Ella Taylor talks with Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams about Wendy and Lucy. Reichardt: "Todd [Haynes] and I have this constant conversation about whether my small way of filmmaking is really easier or really harder."

Nikki Finke talks with the new film critic for the Los Angeles Times, Betsy Sharkey: "Maybe it'll be an absolute disaster. But I think I've got a good mind, and I think I know film. In any case, I'm thrilled and could not be happier."

"In the second chapter of his book Gaming: Essays on Logarithmic Culture, NYU Media Studies prof Alexander Galloway tries to trace the transition between the analog cinema of the past and the all-digital cinema of today's video games," writes Gleb Sidorkin in the Tisch Film Review. "While I agree with Galloway's general assessment that 'video games and film are influencing and incorporating each other in novel ways,' when looking at specific works of art it is important to step back from the new media euphoria and see the broader historical trajectories in which these formal issues have played out."

"Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman is going from past Middle Eastern wars to future global utopias." Steven Zeitchik in the Hollywood Reporter: "The director has acquired rights to 'The Futurological Congress,' a short story from science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, and intends to write the screenplay and shoot the movie as a live-action/animated hybrid." Related: Erica Abeel talks with Folman for indieWIRE.

At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully writes an open letter to Sam Mendes: "You castrated Revolutionary Road."

In the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries has a little fun with a study "by psychologists at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University who claim that romantic comedies make viewers unrealistic about relationships. They found that fans of films such as You've Got Mail and While You Were Sleeping often fail to communicate with their partners effectively. They didn't understand that marriage is not bliss, but a 24/7 nightmare in which your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to keep the thing from becoming a car crash. Let us disabuse these fans with sequels."

Anne Thompson talks with Emma Thompson about Last Chance Harvey, her adaptation-in-progress of My Fair Lady and the sequel to Nanny McPhee.

Emma Pearse talks with Franka Potente, who's "starring as an earnest Cuban guerilla and lover to Benicio del Toro's hairy, brooding Ernesto Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-plus-hour epic, Che, which opened last week. Potente spoke with Vulture from 'fucking dark' Berlin about working with Soderbergh and her upcoming book on fitness for slackers."

"Kirk Douglas, the square-jawed hero famed for saving the world, getting the girl and in moments of toga-clad inspiration declaring 'I am Spartacus!' has a new string to his bow - as MySpace's oldest celebrity blogger." Guy Adams reports for the Independent.

The Yellow Handkerchief is "a gentle, low-key road movie, centering on the eternal need to love and to trust, suffused in the humanist spirit that has won its veteran producer, Arthur Cohn, three Oscars," writes Kevin Thomas. Also in the Los Angeles Times: Mark Olsen meets The Reader's David Kross.

Nathan Gelgud in the Independent Weekly: "I'm in awe of A Christmas Tale, but I don't want to stand in silence, marveling over it; I want to break wine bottles and hoist strangers on my shoulders to celebrate it."

Tim Lucas: "Code Red, the exciting cult video label, has made my Christmas by announcing on their blog that the first-ever widescreen release of Willard Huyck's Messiah of Evil is currently being readied for DVD release next May or June."

"Released in 2000, The Way of the Gun looked like - and it was certainly sold as - a wacky post-Tarantino flick, fast-talking sing-song ping-pong dialogue and adrenalized Mexican standoffs that actually take place in Mexico," writes James Rocchi. "It's actually far, far better than that, if you're tough enough to take it."

S*P*Y*S is an "uneven spy spoof" and "was panned by critics when it was originally released and it's not hard to see why the movie has received a lot of negative press," writes Kimberly Lindbergs, "but I still think S*P*Y*S has a few things to offer potential viewers who are looking for a few laughs."

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

Tom Stempel analyses another round of screenplays at the House Next Door.

Jonathan Lapper is calling on you to join a club.

New blog on the block: "Maitland McDonagh is the author of Movie Lust, Filmmaking on the Fringe, The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time and the definitive auteur study Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento." And she blogs.

Online listening tip. At the House Next Door, Peter Debruge, John Lichman, Vadim Rizov, Michael Joshua Rowin, Andrew Schenker, Keith Uhlich, ST VanAirsdale and Lauren Wissot discuss: "Film Critics in Peril on a Cliffhanger!"

Online listening tips. Ryland Walker Knight and Daniel Coffeen present Vinyl Is Podcast #8, while Ry and Brian Darr give us #9.

Online viewing tips. The SpoutBlog's Kevin Kelly finds "Eight Free Classic SciFi Movies To Ring Out The Old Year."

Spirit, Knight, Watchmen.

"A slain cop is resurrected as a masked crime-fighter in The Spirit but Frank Miller's solo writing-directing debut plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "Pushing well past the point of self-parody, Miller has done Will Eisner's pioneering comicstrip no favors by drenching it in the same self-consciously neo-noir monochrome put to much more compelling use in Sin City.... If this summer's The Dark Knight raised the bar for seriousness, ambition and dramatic realism in the comicbook-based superhero genre, The Spirit reps its antithesis: Relentlessly cartoonish and campy, it's a work of pure digital artifice, feverishly committed to its own beautiful, hollow universe to the exclusion of any real narrative interest or engagement with its characters."

Updated through 12/25.

"Why So Serious?" For Newcity Chicago, Ray Pride surveys the offerings of the season and finds himself returning to The Dark Knight: Christopher Nolan "felt a mood and forged a dark and sufficiently ambiguous series of metaphors for contemporary ills that pro- and anti-vigilante interpretations are equally convincing. Even though everyone's seen it, it may be the most apt holiday movie."

"Watchmen could very well sound the death knell for superhero cinema as we know it," writes Daniel Steadman in Seven: "when faced with this dark, brutal tale of public disorder, international conflict and the threat of global terrorism, men in tights shooting webs or lifting planes begin to look a little preposterous."

Updates, 12/20: "Three years after Sin City, the technique of imposing actors on animated backdrops is wearing a little thin," writes Screen's Mike Goodridge. "Miller is a visionary when it comes to imagery and design, but the dark, dreary setting of Central City sometimes overwhelms The Spirit. Whereas Sin City kept the audience visually distracted with multiple storylines, this film demands that the audience stay in one murky visual milieu for a not-short 108 minutes, and it tests the patience.... Having said that, Miller's script is run through with a wry sense of humour which gives the film some buoyancy, and his actors gamely engage in the noir mood, throwing out one-liners and sexual innuendo with gay abandon."

Paul Matwychuk is amazed, and not in a good way, at "the sheer awfulness of Miller's script, which makes one terrible, inexplicable choice after another.... I had the same relationship with The Spirit that Kif from Futurama has with Zapp Branigan: it seems like every 40 seconds or so, it comes out with something so stupid I can't help but shudder and make an audible little groan of dismay."

Kevin Maher meets Eva Mendes for the London Times.

Update, 12/21: "The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich says that [Samuel L] Jackson is going through his Joan Crawford phase, complete with bulging eyeballs and obsessively sticking to his actor tics," notes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "If that's the case, then Jackson has hit a rock bottom with The Spirit that's comparable only to Crawford's appearance in Trog. If I'm highlighting Jackson's performance as the Octopus, grand mastermind of evil, perhaps it's because he's the only presence on screen that genuinely registers."

Update, 12/23: Geoff Boucher profiles Gabriel Macht for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/24: "[T]he movie's so full of nods to comics and their creators (from DC Comics founder Harry Donenfeld to artist Steve Ditko) that the fanboys will find room in their heart to forgive the desecration," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "Everyone else won't care at all."

But writing in the L Magazine, Henry Stewart finds The Spirit to be "a playful and self-conscious story of jewel heists, magic potions and disposable goons, pitched at children (or, adults' sense of childlike escape), that deals in mock-Chandler voice-overs and the stylized dialogue of 30s radio programs. It's the bat-tithesis of Christian Bale brooding, a welcome respite from the often extremist Comic Books Are Serious position dominating the public discussion. Just because they can be doesn't mean they always have to be."

Update, 12/25: "Miller's script lacks the mythic echoes and the human vulnerability of the best of the recent superhero films," writes Sean Axmaker in the Parallax View, "and his direction lacks the humanizing touches that can pull an audience into an unreal world. This world remains flat and distant, a tipsy balance of Miller's brand of two-fisted pulp exaggeration with slapstick action and camp flourishes that can't decides if it wants to be taken seriously or not. It might have looked good on paper, but then this isn't a paper medium. It's cinema, and for a man schooled in the differences by Eisner himself, you'd think he's have taken the lesson to heart."

In the New York Times, AO Scott wonders "why, somewhere in the middle of The Spirit, Samuel L Jackson and Scarlett Johansson arrive on screen decked out in swastikas and jackboots. Nothing in the logic of the film explains it, but then, to use the phrase 'the logic of the film' when talking about The Spirit may be to take the 'oxy' out of 'oxymoronic.'"

"The Spirit ran in the Sunday sections of newspapers through 1952, and it's revered (for good reason) by comic book fans to this day," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "You can't blame Miller for wanting to adapt it to the big screen. But while Miller certainly has a strong visual sense (as a comic book artist, he knows how to compose beautifully within the frame), he's clueless about movement and pacing, and his actors seem to have no idea what's going on, either."

"As a babe-delivery system, The Spirit is a rousing success," notes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "In every other sense, it's a pronounced failure."

For Josef Braun, "this hermetically sealed world that eschews what some of us love about movies: actual places, sunlight, spontaneity, interaction, evocations of sensual experience."

"Gone were Eisner's primary colors, replaced by muddy and amateurish black-and-white visuals with digitally added snow that never seemed to stick," writes Ed Champion. "The Spirit was so bad that it made Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy look like a masterpiece."

For the SpoutBlog's Kevin Buist, this is "an elaborately stylized train wreck."

"Eva Mendes gives the movie a mild jolt as Denny's childhood flame Sand Saref, now an international thief with a thing for plunging necklines," notes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "But even comic-book characters need souls, and Miller's have none."

Lists and awards, 12/18.

Let's start with an online listening tip. For WNYC, Nathan Lee talks with Time Out film editor Melissa Anderson and New York Times film critic AO Scott about the contrast between the magnitude of social, political and economical events in 2008 and the "micro" feel of the year's movies.

"When it comes to end of year top tens, I find the undistributed lists far more interesting (and useful) than the standard ones which, naturally, have a lot of overlap." Andrew Grant lists his top ten undistributed films of 2008. His #1: Roy Andersson's You, The Living.

Glenn Kenny posts a "conversation starter," 21 favorite films of 08 "in what I will call vague order of preference." His #1: Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeaise.

At AMC News, James Rocchi puts Steven Soderbergh's Che at the top of his "10 American Fiction Films in Wide Release" list.

Anna Bak-Kvapil presents the second half of the Tisch Film Review's list of the "Top 10 Repertory Films of 2008." And once again, here's part 1.

At IFC, Matt Singer and Alison Willmore list "2008's Most Covetable DVD Box Sets."

Slumdog Millionaire scores six nominations from London's Critics' Circle. Archie Thomas, who's got the full list at Variety, notes that three films follow with five nominations each: Frost/Nixon, Happy-Go-Lucky and Hunger.

"I dropped out of the Chicago Film Critics Association last year, partly because I was so frustrated by the bovine timidity of its year-end awards," blogs the Reader's JR Jones. "Announced this morning, the 2008 awards are more of the same." At any rate, WALL•E wins best picture, best original screenplay, best animated feature and best original score.

As more ballots appear in indieWIRE's poll of critics, Tom Hall elaborates on his.

Cartoon Brew's Jerry Beck's working on a new book and needs your help selecting the "100 Greatest Looney Tunes."

An "alternative Top 10"? Marshall Fine explains.

Online eeek! The Smoking Gun collects its "2008 Mug Shots of the Year."

Online scrolling tip. The Big Picture's "2008 in photographs (part 2 of 3)." Earlier: Part 1.

Online listening tip. Fred Kaplan samples the "Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2008" at Slant. Meantime, the Music Club has convened: Ann Powers, Robert Christgau and Jody Rosen discuss the best of the best.

Fests and events, 12/18.

For the Austin Chronicle, Josh Rosenblatt talks with Austin Underground Film Festival founder Andy Gately about some of the films screening tomorrow.

Wavelength "has been laughed out of the cinema and lauded as a minimalist masterpiece, yet [Michael] Snow seems relatively unfazed," writes Jessica Lack in the Guardian. "In fact he decided to title his new exhibition Yes Snow Show for that very reason. 'The curator asked me if I could suggest a title for the exhibition and it became Yes Snow Show,' he says. 'I like it because it contains the possible extreme reactions, positive and negative, to my work. Perhaps it'll encourage discussion.'" Through February 1 at the BFI Southbank Gallery.

Online listening tip. Laugh and Live: The Films of Douglas Fairbanks runs at MoMA through January 12. Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta, co-authors of the biography Douglas Fairbanks, are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip. In anticipation of Scorsese Classics, running at the Walter Reade in New York from December 26 through 31, the filmlinc blog's Amanda McCormick posts The Big Shave.

The Class.

LA Weekly's Ella Taylor on The Class: "As in Human Resources and the devastating Time Out ([Laurent] Cantet seems most at ease in the workplace, which may be why Heading South, about sex tourism in Haiti, is his only misfire), he builds thickly detailed experiential worlds through which he slowly leaks the pressing problems of our age - unemployment, downsizing, and now, in The Class, the changing meaning of education in a multiracial, heavily immigrant environment, where the very idea of a unifying culture has all but broken down. If that sounds dry, it's anything but."

Updated through 12/22.

"In all, The Class is a prime document of French post-colonial blues, though its relevance to American urban education could not be any greater if it had been made in the Bronx or Trenton or South Los Angeles," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "I would be surprised if this brilliant and touching film didn't become required viewing for teachers all over the United States. Everyone else should see it as well - it's a wonderful movie."

"It's all designed to flatter the middle-class art-film audience's patronizing attitude toward the Third World," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

Interviews with Cantet: Erica Abeel (indieWIRE), Elisabeth Donnelly (Tribeca), Phil Nugent (Screengrab) and Stephen Saito (IFC).

Craig Phillips notes that the screenplay's free to download.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and New York.

Updates, 12/20: The Class "exemplifies the anti-Oscar aesthetic," writes Dana Stevens in Slate:

It's an unsentimental slice-of-life story, shot on digital film with a cast of unglamorous unknowns. What few moments of suspense it has to offer are almost entirely language-related: Did he really just use that word? In what sense did he mean it? And what purpose does the imperfect subjunctive serve, anyway? Yet The Class is also one of the few films this year that I'd recommend without reservations to just about anyone. If you've ever sat in a classroom (or stood in front of one), if you're interested in thinking about race, social class, language, loyalty, work - oh, let's just say life - this unassuming movie will nail you to your seat.

"One of the several remarkable things about this austere and masterly movie - which may remind cinephiles of the calm clarity and seeming simplicity of the French master, Robert Bresson - is that [François] Bégaudeau is playing a version of himself, in a screenplay of his own devising that is in turn based on a novel that he also wrote." Richard Schickel in Time: "It is hard to think of another film more tightly autobiographical than this one. It's even harder to think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents."

"Three of the last five Palme d'Or winners have been documentary-style dramas," notes Darrell Hartman in Interview. "In addition to The Class, there's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days... and the Belgian drama The Child, which won in 2005.... Ken Loach's Irish-nationalist drama The Wind that Shakes the Barley, which won in 2006, doesn't exactly look like a documentary, but it does come from one of cinema's foremost practitioners of social realism. Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2004 winner, is the odd one out - ironic, considering it's a documentary."

"[D]uring the second half's institutional breakdown, the movie truly comes alive, casting off any To Monsieur, with Love aspirations and turning into something much more complicated, chewy and real," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

Heading South "found [Cantet] shading too far into lefty didacticism, but The Class commits itself so fully to its semi-documentary style that there's no space for editorializing," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Update, 12/22: "Rather than To Sir with Love, it recalls British director Ken Loach's brand of leftist social realism," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Of the four films Laurent Cantet has made, three center around the workplace (or its absence, as in his 2001 masterpiece, Time Out.) Like his debut Human Resources, The Class examines the way people exercise power over each other in a charged environment."

Yes Man.

"That stink emanating from the vicinity of Yes Man is desperation - specifically, that of Jim Carrey, who with this Peyton Reed-helmed comedy both cops to his dramatic forays' imprudence and attempts to right his career's downhill slide by unimaginatively rehashing Liar Liar," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"'And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself' isn't just a line from A Visit from St Nicholas - it's how I felt about Jim Carrey's performance in the new comedy Yes Man." Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "Having been annoyed by his antics in many of his recent outings - take Fun with Dick and Jane, please - the world-class mugger dials it down and delights in this breezy (if somewhat formulaic) flick."

Updated through 12/25.

"This is the fourth film directed by Raleigh's own Reed, who - since his debut teen charmer Bring It On - has been making films about manipulative, immature adults," notes Nathan Gelgud in the Independent Weekly. "Down With Love got most of its energy from the unbankable conceit of tossing off a Doris Day-Rock Hudson trifle. Reed's last movie, The Break-Up, concerning the disintegration of a relationship between two unlikable bores, derived a weird kind of zeal from the fact that Reed's serious direction was out of proportion with the film's ineffective content. This led a friend to accuse The Break-Up of "thinking it was (Woody Allen's) Husbands and Wives.' Unfortunately, Yes Man's cinematic approach is not at risk of being mentioned in the same breath as that of Husbands and Wives. It's doubtful anyone would even mention it in the same breath as that of When Harry Met Sally."

Armond White in the New York Press: "Right now, Carrey's career is more troubled than Mickey Rourke's - an avoidable point in the gag about custom-made celebrity look-a-like cakes. Carrey looks at the Mickey Rourke cake and in Yes Man's best line worries, 'I hope it doesn't taste like Mickey Rourke."

"Just say no," advises Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader.

Updates, 12/20: "Physical comedians age in dog years, and Jim Carrey is panting heavily," writes Josh Levin in Slate. "If you find Carrey's latter-day mien too depressing to bear, perhaps it's best to think of Yes Man as a Zooey Deschanel vehicle. Despite being forced to inhabit a character infused with Garden State levels of quirkiness... Deschanel keeps things light and frothy as Carrey flails away."

"The role of Mr Carrey's romantic counterpart is never an easy one, given his manic energy and the childish narcissism that is the basis of his shtick," notes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Only Kate Winslet, engaging with a more subdued incarnation of Mr Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has been able to distract him from himself."

"Watching Yes Man was, for me, a completely joyless experience," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "I just can't take pleasure in seeing Carrey fall, figuratively or literally. His particular brand of mugging and physical shtick drove some people crazy right from the start, but I used to delight in his pinpoint timing, in the effortless ballet of his rubbery limbs. Carrey is astonishing in Dumb & Dumber, a poo-humor masterstroke. At the time, there was no one like him, and even now, there's still no one like him - but his distinctiveness no longer matters. With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over."

"Everything's so apathetic that the movie feels like a shrug, and even Flight of the Conchords' Rhys Darby, phoning in a sad Ricky Gervais impersonation, can't get a laugh out of this dreck," writes Paul Constant in the Stranger.

"Carrey can turn in strong performances, but sincerity and humility just look like more poses pulled from his bag of funny faces," observes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"We couldn't summarize Yes Man better than Carrey did on the Tonight Show on Tuesday, when he purported to fall asleep and offered this précis between snores," notes Richard Corliss in Time: "'Carl Allen is a guy who doesn't engage in life. Then he decides to say yes to everything, no matter how silly or deranged it is. Critics are calling it a panacea for our dark times we're living in.' In a little swipe at the competition, Carrey said of Yes Man, 'It's the only movie this weekend where nobody dies in the end.'"

"Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly," writes Roger Ebert. "When a lawyer must tell the truth and wants desperately not to (even pounding himself over the head with a toilet seat to stop himself), it's funny. When a loan officer must say 'yes' and wants to, where is the tension?"

Yes Man is actually based on a book - by Danny Wallace, who tells the story of the adaptation from his POV in the Guardian.

Update, 12/25: Online listening tip. Ambrose Heron talks with Danny Wallace.

Spanish Cinema Now. 8.

Today's entry from James Van Maanen. Earlier: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Last Saturday afternoon, the Spanish Cinema Now series offered a one-time-only screening of one of the "damned" Spanish silent films. No - this was not very early Visconti. Rather, as the gentleman Jose Maria Prado, director of the Ministry of Culture, Spain, who graciously and informatively introduced the film explained, "damned" was the expression (and a good one I'd say) for films that - for whatever reason - failed to ever find a theatrical release. Many of these may still languish in vaults somewhere, I suppose, but now, at least, we've had the opportunity to see The Sixth Sense (El Sexto Sentido).

Nearly 75 years later, M Night Shyamalan's formula - a bit of boredom followed by a surprise twist - has nothing on this enchanting and funny movie that, at just over 70 minutes, combines a budding boy-wins-loses-wins-girl romance with the tale of a professor who professes to have found a way to capture - not just life but truth! - via moving pictures. Comedy, philosophy and depression follow - and all because of a deadbeat dad who demands to go to the bullfight. How do you say plus ça change in Spanish?

The movie, written and co-directed (with Eusebio Fernández Ardavín) by Nemesio M Sobrevila is full of fun and the occasional avant-garde detail, moment or idea. Maybe these, more than anything else, relegated the film to its "damned" status. (Or else Catholic Spain of 1929 was not quite ready for the bizarre connections the movie gamely makes.) Adding immensely to our enjoyment of this silent flick was the live piano accompaniment provided by Carolyn Schwarz.

One of the SCN's more unusual and stylistically serious films is young Catalan filmmaker Pere Vilà i Barceló's Railroad Crossing (Pas a nivell). It took me a while to get used to the grainy, slightly-unfocused visuals, as well as to rarely being able (for the first half hour, at least) to get a good, close look at the main character, who seems intensely alone. I thought he had just graduated from something comparable to our high school, but the program notes informed me that it was university.

This character, Marc, played with a near-placid stoicism by a tall, good-looking and rangy young actor named Marc Homs, seems to have no friends and only a cursory connection with his family and co-workers. He's a major "loner" in the making. We see Marc at home, at work, vaguely propositioning a prostitute, masturbating in the shower, even being forced into learning dance steps from his grandmother - all with the same fogged-glass exterior that manages to hide any feeling, if indeed much feeling exists. Then, in one very strong scene, we see it.

This scene, together with some other moments in the movie called to my mind last year's La Soledad by Jaime Rosales. But Railroad Crossing is nowhere near as accomplished a work, though it shows promise and a welcome rigor. Toward the end, Marc even seems to have made a connection - two, actually - that might induce some positive feelings. In both cases, the camera remains so far away from the event that we can't really tell. Then he and we go back to his daily routine which is beginning to bore us as much as it bores him. Suddenly, in the midst of an odd, perhaps first-time event, the movie ends. I will be interested in watching this filmmaker's further career, even though I occasionally had to pinch myself to stay awake during this, his first full-length film. Railroad Crossing screens again Sunday, December 21, at 4:15 pm.

Sam Bottoms, 1955 - 2008.

Sam Bottoms, a film and television actor who played the role of California surfer-turned-GI Lance Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, has died. He was 53.

Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times.

The younger brother of Timothy Bottoms, with whom he made his film debut in The Last Picture Show (1971), went on to a number of high profile gigs." Lance "could have stepped out of a silent film, as unflappable as Buster Keaton as all hell breaks loose around him, unscratched by calamity due to an essential, almost holy simplicity that strips him of desire and renders him bulletproof. His tragic "stumble-minded" character in The Last Picture Show isn't so fortunate... and yet he's the happiest of the lot, even up to the moment of his senseless death.

Arbogast.

SAG. Nominations.

"The members of the Screen Actors Guild recently took a short break from calling for the replacement of their union's leadership to vote on those which they felt were the year's best performances," writes Lane Brown, who's got the full list at Vulture. "SAG's awards are typically a more accurate Oscar predictor than most of the other meaningless ones you've been hearing about lately." Doubt leads with five nominations; Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button follow with three each.

Updates: Commentary: David Carr, David Poland, Anne Thompson and Jeffrey Wells.

Time Out New York. "The year in film, A to Z."

A fun feature from David Fear and Joshua Rothkopf.

For example, "A is for Asia Argento," "B is for bloodsucking teens" ... "S is for self-distribution" and so on, all the way through to "Z is for Zachary."

Lists and awards, 12/17.

"Our official 'B-movie' distribution stream - straight-to-DVD releases - grows in number and variety every year, as fewer films can be, or at least are, affordably shown theatrically than ever before," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC. "Here're my favorites from this year, the movies that first saw American screens (big or small) on digital video in 2008, be they brand new or decades old." His #1: Lawrence Jordan's Sophie's Place.

Jürgen Fauth presents "a highly subjective list of ten great unreleased films I saw at the four festivals I was lucky enough to attended this year - Berlin, the Hamptons, New York and Tribeca. Let's hope they'll make it to a theater near you soon." His #1: Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army.

"While the rest of the Internet-verse is prepping their 2008 Best Ofs, Favorites, and Annual Excuse for Lists, Exploding Kinetoscope, counterproductive as always, proudly presents its Favorite Films of 2007."

"In a nice change of pace from the predictable rotation of best picture winners happening around the United States, the Toronto Film Critics' Association named Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy best picture of the year, in addition to honoring its star, Michelle Williams, as best actress." Peter Knegt reports for indieWIRE.

As the ballots keep rolling into indieWIRE, Karina Longworth adds a few notes to hers at the SpoutBlog.

AJ Schnack's launched a series of interviews with "some of the year's top nonfiction filmmakers." So far: James Marsh (Man on Wire) and Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water).

Dreaming up "categories that you might not see elsewhere," Noah Forrest awards the first round of Frenzies; also at Movie City News: Houston Film Critics' choice for best picture, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and the Dallas-Ft Worth Critics's choice: Slumdog Millionaire.

In the New York Observer, Sara Vilkomerson's got ten and Rex Reed lists his bests and worsts.

Northwest Film Forum's David Hanagan: "For all you sprocket heads out there, here are my top ten Kodak 16mm film stocks for 2008."

Guess who's Time's Person of the Year 2008. Steven Spielberg on one of the runners-up: "On the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008, 2 billion TV viewers and thousands in attendance in the now famous Bird's Nest were treated to an unforgettable spectacle at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games. Behind it all was the creative genius of Chinese film director Zhang Yimou."

Online scrolling tip. From one of the best new blogs of the year, the Big Picture's "2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3)."

Online viewing tip. "Kermodean Highlights from 2008."

Online viewing tips. Kevin Lee's "5 Best Music Videos of 2008" at the SpoutBlog.

Nothing But the Truth.

"Despite an intriguingly familiar title and a story that hinges on a journalist at a powerful newspaper who is jailed for refusing to name her source, Nothing But the Truth has nothing to do with you know what or who," writes Manohla Dargis in, well, you know where. "To be honest, I was looking forward to watching a movie about Judith Miller, the former reporter from the New York Times who in 2005 was jailed for contempt of court after she refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Wilson (a k a Plame) as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.... I'm not really sure what [Rod] Lurie, whose previous films include The Contender, an exploration of female political power and its threat, believed he was saying in this new film. Nothing but the Truth has nothing much at all to do with the historical record, which wouldn't be bad if it offered something persuasive and worthwhile in return, like a reckoning of journalism and its abuses."

Updated through 12/20.

"Rather than Iraq and the nonexistent WMDs that Miller helped persuade the world were an imminent danger, the trigger is a would-be presidential assassination that, blamed on Venezuela, precipitates a US attack on Caracas," writes writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "After secret agent Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga) apparently leaks the information that the Venezuelan connection is bogus, journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) scoops the world by identifying Van Doren as a spook. Adding to the fun, both women are soccer moms, whose kids attend the same DC school. The actresses are otherwise well-matched - sanctimonious Beckinsale is coltish yet stubborn; faintly ironic Farmiga tough but girlish."

"Lurie could rightly be accused of oversimplifying a knotty case to score points for embattled journalists, but goodness knows, the field could use a boost," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "But mostly, Nothing But the Truth operates a lot like Billy Ray's Shattered Glass and Breach, offering up the sort of no-nonsense, meat-and-potatoes docudrama that's in short supply these days."

"The film easily could have gotten saddled with liberal polemics and pedestrian plot twists, but Lurie's focus is on lean, intelligent storytelling while keeping his righteous anger worked seamlessly into plotting and character development," writes Jay Antani in Slant.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Lurie "about his roots in political life, the sudden collapse of the film's distributor, Yari Film Group, and his next project, a remake of Straw Dogs."

Earlier: David D'Arcy from Toronto.

Update, 12/18: "While my moviegoing companion dismissed Nothing But the Truth as 'a steaming pile of dung,' I felt compelled to defend the movie's odder moments, even as I simultaneously recognized it as a deeply flawed political drama," writes Ed Champion. "Beneath Nothing But the Truth's implausible and pleasantly preposterous politics beats the half-hidden heart of a perfectly respectable exploitation film."

"Instead of the tired national security vs freedom of speech debate, it'd be great to have a dialogue about the implied contractual nature of the Bill of Rights, about how our Founding Fathers likely expected some reasonably responsible behavior on the part of its citizenry in return for these rights carved out from the government." Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE: "This kind of complexity doesn't make for easy or exciting cinema, and ignoring a real, hard civics lesson is an obvious choice for a political thriller. This is Lurie's right. But that doesn't mean we need to like the results."

"Previously known for potboilers whose tone was just shy of hysterical (The Contender in particular), Lurie here takes a welcome step back from hyperbole," writes Chris Barsanti at Film Journal International. "He's produced a crisply shot drama that takes a tangled knot of issues and plays them out with a reasonable amount of realism."

Updates, 12/20: "Lurie spins off into invention like a Law & Order writer on deadline, scrambling the issues so thoroughly it's no longer clear what, if anything, the movie is meant to address," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times.

Brent Simon talks with Beckinsale for Vulture.

Seven Pounds.

"Seven Pounds is approximately two hours long, and it spends almost the entirety of that time hiding its premise from you, and wondering why Will Smith is behaving so strangely," writes Paul Matwychuk. "The answer turns out to be both stranger and more banal than you expect. By the standards of normal human behaviour, Smith's plan is nuts - involving identity theft, all sorts of creepy, passive-aggressive stalker behavior, and a climactic bathtub scene that really has to be seen to be believed - but by the standards of 'uplifting' Hollywood dramas, the self-sacrificing saintliness of Smith's motives is depressingly familiar, especially if you've already seen movies like Pay It Forward, The Bucket List or Reign Over Me."

Updated through 12/20.

"Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco." Scott Foundas in the Voice: "Writing at the time, I praised the film for Smith's superb performance and for its willingness to honestly address the social and economic realities of America's underclass. Watching Smith and Muccino's latest collaboration, Seven Pounds, I marveled (to paraphrase the great Jermaine Jackson) that something so right could go so wrong."

Muccino "seems to think he's in Ingmar Bergman territory, but he's actually made the longest, most dour episode of My Name is Earl imaginable," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"The film plays like an exercise in annoying the viewer, deliberately confusing not for any meaningful purpose, but merely because if any of our questions were answered in a timely fashion, there wouldn't be any movie left," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"The most morbid feel-good movie of the season, Seven Pounds takes the notion of self-sacrifice and pushes it beyond an act of nobility into the realm of a last-chance suicide mission," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "While I can't bring myself to give away the revelations of Smith's character, which are the entire reason this film exists, I can say that the film is about giving of one's self to the last drop of blood. The result is a pretty looking, sugarcoated Hollywood confection that won't bring itself to admit that it's about a ghoul dancing on the edge of his grave."

"Though the heavyness sometimes turns into heavy-handedness, particularly in the film's central romance between Will Smith's martyr and Rosario Dawson's victimized girl-next-door, overall it's an impressive, often moving, work about penance and sacrifice," finds the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik.

Allison Samuels talks with Smith for Newsweek.

Updates, 12/18: "A glib, charming movie star - but resourceless actor - Smith must think scrunching-up his face and looking worried for two hours shows serious concentration and emotional gravity," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Apparently, he is unaware of the ways that movies and movie stars communicate depth and sincerity."

The film "soon turns from an intriguing investigation of morality and grief into an exercise in maudlin excess," writes Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Interviews with Dawson: Brent Simon (Vulture) and Chris Willman (Los Angeles Times).

Updates, 12/20: Before clicking on Stephanie Zacharek's name, you should see Salon's editor's note: "This review contains spoilers, from the first sentence on. Seriously." Since I'll very likely never see this movie - ever - I read on, and I did find a sentence safe to cut-n-paste here: "As holiday heartwarmers go, Seven Pounds is so unintentionally ghoulish, it makes Black Christmas look like It's a Wonderful Life."

"Frankly, though," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, as if in response to SZ's first sentence, "I don't see how any review could really spoil what may be among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made. I would tell you to go out and see it for yourself, but you might take that as a recommendation rather than a plea for corroboration. Did I really see what I thought I saw?"

"I will not offer a review of this film, as that would be a waste of the little time we have together in this review space," begins Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "But to those who do watch Seven Pounds and see its shocking 'revelation,' I want to offer this reading or decoding of its narrative: The movie is about the death of the black male."

The Oregonian's Michael Russell:

As DK Holm recently pointed out - citing examples ranging from James Cagney to Steven Seagal - "actors can be just as much the auteurs behind their films as directors." This seems especially true of male stars prone to action roles: Why, despite a rotating roster of directors, is Mel Gibson always getting tortured? Why does Tom Cruise have a long streak of films in which he learns a vocational skill or wears a mask? Why is Seagal always playing guitar and yakking about the environment? Why is Harrison Ford always rescuing his wife and holding up his Index Finger of Doom?

We can now definitively add to this list Will Smith - who in Seven Pounds continues the lonely-messed-up-savior streak he started with I Am Legend and Hancock.

"Having, with The Pursuit of Happyness, already proven himself capable of bringing raw sensitivity to mawkish material, there was modest reason to hope that Smith might again pull off the same feat in his second collaboration with that film's director, Gabriele Muccino," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "No such luck. Seven Pounds is misguided mush from the moment go, a deliberately muddled bit of inspirational pap that masks its inherent silliness with structural obliqueness and, worse still, affords Smith scant opportunities to infuse his character with authentic humanity."

For the New Republic's Christopher Orr, this is "a dour, morally beclouded film that confuses generosity and grief, self-abnegation and self-annihilation."

"The trick of Seven Pounds, a k a Extreme Makeover: Will Smith Edition, is that it takes the most self-serving redemption conceit imaginable and converts it into a tale of Christ-like sacrifice and grace," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "It's a con job that feels like a precisely attenuated work of art, elegantly weaving flashbacks and ellipses into the story in an effort to conceal how shamelessly manipulative it is in the end. And as always, Smith comes out a winner."

"The message of Seven Pounds (other than, Don't text-message while driving) is that even the most depressive person can find a way to make other people happy," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "If that doesn't sound like a movie to buoy your Christmas spirit, ask yourself this: How often do you sit through a film's closing credits so you have a little private time to wipe away the tears?"

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man.

"Imperative to catch on the big screen, Stephen Kijak's Scott Walker: 30 Century Man opens today for one week only at the IFC Center in New York." NP Thompson at the House Next Door: "There are other fleeting, theatrical engagements in the offing for early '09 before this documentary, long denied to American audiences though it did smashingly well in the UK, settles onto DVD. But having first seen it 18 months ago in a real movie theater and then again last week on my laptop, I can state with certainty that Kijak's collage-like approach to recreating 1960s pop music history, and tracing its influence through the subsequent decades, loses something in immediacy and intimacy on the small box. And the abstract visualizations that Kijak devises - soft-focused, delicately hallucinatory mosaics in orange and gold that feel all of a piece with Walker's era and sensibility - cry out for the widest panorama."

Updated through 12/20.

"To say that Walker is to pop music what Joyce was to literature perhaps implies undue import, but the comparison is helpful in that one must allow oneself to listen to, and enjoy, The Drift in the same way one might read, and enjoy, Ulysses," writes David Lowery in Hammer to Nail. "Stephen Kijak provides a fine point of entry with his documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man... For all its biographical accounting, 30 Century Man is at its best when Kijak follows Walker into the studio to observe the process behind The Drift."

"To its credit, 30 Century Man is seriously focused on defining and promoting appreciation for the music itself," writes Leah Churner in Reverse Shot. "Much of it is organized into a 'listening party' format, in which various musicians are shot in close-up as they hear recordings of Walker's music, providing commentary and some interesting facial expressions: David Bowie, Sting, Brian Eno, certain members of Radiohead, Ute Lemper, Damon Albarn and Allison 'electroclash' Goldfrapp, who praises Walker for 'not hiding behind fashion or rhythm.' The long span of releases from the Walker Brothers' first single, Pretty Girls Everywhere (1965), to Tilt (1995) provides plenty of conversational fodder.... I thought 30 Century Man would provide some kind of an experiential inroad to his persona, something persuasive and winning - a hook, in short. I forgot hooks are for pop songs, not trips to Hell. Smell you later, Orpheus."

IndieWIRE interviews Kijak.

Update, 12/18: Diedrich Diederichsen in Artforum:

Walker's own take on his artistic persona is evident in his songs, with their homages to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean Genet and their evocations of physical violence and primal d