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As long as we’re singing the praises of Rialto Pictures this week, I should note they’ve not only announced a strong New York/Los Angeles/Chicago/Washington, DC opening for The Battle of Algiers (1965) on January 9, but have also released a very good trailer for the film, which can be seen via the Film Forum’s website.

Given the fact that Rialto’s trailer for Balthazar was not exactly the most creative piece of advertising I’ve seen (in short, a few “minor” scenes cut together without any sense of the film’s importance or thematic concerns), I’m very pleased to see their Algiers…

“That Robert Bresson‘s 13 features remain largely unknown and unavailable in this country (only one is available here on DVD) is a measure of our impoverished film culture and a reason why one of the heroes of the movie year is Rialto Pictures, the New York distributor reissuing Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar. The film opens today at the Nuart and there is no more important a movie in theaters.”

Read Manohla Dargis’ full review here.…

I’ve been meaning to write about my experience last Thursday of seeing Mikhail Vardanov‘s new documentary Parajanov: The Last Spring at–of all places–the Hollywood Entertainment Museum just down the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was a slightly surreal experience watching the passionate, contemplative film about the life of the persecuted Georgian-born Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov projected on a screen perched between Roman costumes from Ben-Hur (1959) on the left and a life-sized statue of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) on the right. Nevertheless, the screening room was packed …

Given my eclectic approach to film appreciation, it’s funny how various events surprisingly coincide. On Friday, I travelled to the University of California in San Diego to attend a colloquium given by filmmaker and academic Babette Mangolte, who discussed her latest research project connecting the ideological dots between French avant-garde filmmakers of the ’20s and the film theories of Robert Bresson in the ’50s, whose Au hasard Balthazar opens Friday here in L.A.

Paris in the ’20s was a hotbed of artistic movements–particularly surrealism and impressionism–a myriad collection of modern aesthetics promoted by filmmaker-theorists such as Abel Gance, Marcel …

I haven’t seen this film, but it’s stories like this that just warm my heart:

Technically speaking, the Greek film Hard Goodbyes: My Father is a contender for the Oscars and the Golden Globes. But don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it…So far, the film has appeared in just two U.S. theaters.

Journalist and film buff Liz Yuan is trying to change that. Yuan is president of Sipapu Films, the company that brought director Penny Panayotopoulou‘s film to the United States. Yuan is also the company’s head of publicity, its sole investor, and its envelope stuffer.

Facets Multimedia in Chicago has long been one of the foremost distributors of world cinema on video in the US, and it just keeps adding to its services. It rents by mail, offers its own cinematheque and film classes, and has generated a slew of publications over the years related to its inventory. I’ve got its Human Rights Film Guide that was published 18 years ago, which lists over 400 films cross-indexed by subject area, geographic region, country and title.

This week, I received the new Facets Movie Lovers Guide, a free catalogue to anyone living in the US …