Author: Robert Koehler

By Robert Koehler

Even the Rain is a Ken Loach film directed by Iciar Bollain. Even more, it’s a film by Paul Laverty, Loach’s regular screenwriter. The film is a useful object in this regard: By watching Even the Rain (in Palm Springs because of its status as Spain’s foreign language Oscar submission), it’s clearer than ever that all of Loach’s recent films written by Laverty (up to and including Route Irish, one of the worst films ever to screen in a Cannes competition) are less films by Loach than films by Laverty. The same Laverty formula in the …

By Robert Koehler

Missing a film for eleven months since its premiere, particularly if it won an overrated but nevertheless weighty prize like Berlinale’s Golden Bear, can create an odd mix of sensations, with frustration (how I missed it in Berlin in the first place) to excessive anticipation (from the sheer wait). It can’t be allowed to cloud judgement, but it’s a challenge to sweep away when the film is finally seen. That was what I was going through this morning with the first screening in Palm Springs of Semih Kaplanoglu’s Honey, the final part of his Yusuf trilogy …

By Robert Koehler

Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Depardieu, Francois Ozon–the ideal trio combo to launch the latest edition of the aggressively middlebrow Palm Springs Film Festival, which promotes a certain brand of world cinema that continues to view Europe as the center of the world. And if it stars Deneuve, all the better. The film? You may have heard of it, even though it astoundingly, amazingly, inexplicably, ridiculously hasn’t screened at a US festival until this very moment. (The closest location was Toronto, on the heels of its world premiere in Venice, which got it because Cannes stupidly passed on it …

By Robert Koehler

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The lobby of Downtown Independent, where the first New Media film festival played Friday through Sunday, June 11-13. The festival is one of the first to be located purely at Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main St., located on the west side of Main between 2nd and 3rd and the only independently run cinema in downtown Los Angeles.

As ImaginAsian, the venue struggled, but reconfigured as a home to a broad range of independent cinema wedged somewhere between a more commercial house like the Nuart and a microcinema like Cinefamily at …

By Robert Koehler

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Apichatpong approximately 72 hours before he won the Palme d’Or. He had just arrived in Cannes from turmoil in Bangkok, as a group of us greeted him at the Princess Stephanie Hotel (also home to the premiere screenings of films in the Quinzaine). He presented his producers (and partners in the UK-based Illumination Films) with gifts of electric mosquito swatters, which are featured in an amusing nighttime scene in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. At this point during the festival, nobody had inflated expectations that Uncle …