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I know it’s a bit early, but consider this fair warning to mark your calendars and stock up on pre-orders: September will be Carl Theodor Dreyer month for cinephiles. In addition to the cable retrospective scheduled by Turner Classic Movies, Image Entertainment have just announced their long-awaited DVD restoration of one of Dreyer’s best and most rarely-seen films, The Parson’s Widow (1920), to be released September 21. Don’t let its year of production fool you–its playful narrative, enticing dose of macabre humor, and philosophical sophistication might convince someone it was made years (or decades) later than it actually was.

From …

The website for the 29th Toronto International Film Festival (September 9-18) has officially gone live today, and I couldn’t be more delighted as I’m planning to attend this year. Passes will go on sale July 19 and in-person sales will begin on July 26.

While the official line-up won’t be announced until August 24, the site has already mentioned some titles to look forward to, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique, Chantal Akerman’s Demain on dÈmÈnage, and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, among many others.

Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a stellar line-up this year……

A few weeks ago, the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C. sponsored a Val Lewton retrospective that included such films as Cat People (1942), The Leopard Man (1943), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), three of Lewton’s most famous productions, all directed by Jacques Tourneur. In many ways, Tourneur’s reputation has always struggled to free itself from Lewton’s name since the RKO producer made a series of inventive, low-budget horror films which emphasized shadows and mystery, offscreen space, and a strong sense of theme. (Working with other directors, Lewton also produced such classics as Curse of the Cat People…

This week, Miramax video released Martin Scorsese’s moving four-hour documentary on postwar Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy (1999). I’ll never forget seeing the film in a packed Castro Theatre in San Francisco a few years ago and the raucous applause that followed it. It’s a personal tribute to internationally acclaimed films by Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others–films Scorsese remembers his family gathering around the TV to watch when he was a child. Interspersing a brief reconstruction of his family’s milieu with many clips from the films, Scorsese confirms again why I …

For those who have been wondering about my recent absence, I went to a music festival with some friends last week and was surprised to discover I didn’t have Internet access for a few days. Stay tuned for several updates…

After I arrived back home yesterday, I learned of Terrence Rafferty’s piece on Robert Bresson in Sunday’s New York Times, an article that fails to generate much enthusiasm for Bresson’s work and perpetuates ho-hum and presumptious ideas about the filmmaker’s “darkening” tone and “loss of faith” in his later films. Whenever interviewers asked Bresson about his increasing lack of …

“Increasingly some of the greatest international film archives–currently the CinÈmathËque franÁaise and Britainís National Film and Television Archive–are under acute threat from official economic cut-backs and the incursion of ill-informed new bureaucracies.

The most acute current crisis is the threat to the National Film and Television Archive. The British Film Institute, the body currently entrusted with its administration, has drawn up an ill-considered ìPlanî for financial cut-back and reorganisation of the Archive.”

Click FilmArchiveAction.org for more information and to sign a petition in support of the Archive.…