Category: Film festival

Days in Berlin 2010

Film festival, Film review


James Benning’s Ruhr

By Robert Koehler

Last things first: Having arrived here in Berlin from the Rotterdam film festival, I wanted to let any readers tracking Filmjourney that my in-depth comments on IFFR will be posted following Berlin. That’s because Rotterdam had too many worthy films to merely mention in passing, and because the programming raised ideas and notions worth mulling at greater length.

For now, let’s say that the Rotterdam Tiger jury (led by Amat Escalante) got things generally right, with Tigers for Paz Fabrega’s Agua fria del mar, Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s Alamar and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History…

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AFI FEST 2009 preview

Film festival, Site news

I’ve championed AFI FEST the previous two years since Artistic Director Rose Kuo came on board and pushed the festival into becoming Los Angeles’ best survey of world cinema. And I’ve been even more excited this year due to the programming involvement of Robert Koehler, a bona fide cinephile, critic, and festival hound (and occasional contributor to this site).

So I’m especially pleased to announce today that I’ve been hired as the editor of the festival’s Daily News, a position that will begin in October and last through the festival itself, October 30 to November 7, 2009. (The Daily …

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LAFF Capsules

Film festival

Here are short responses to three of the films I saw at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. I’ll be posting longer reviews of more films later this week. -Doug


A Week Alone (Celina Murga, Argentina)

Murga’s debut 2002 feature, Ana and the Others (miraculously available on DVD and Netflix instant play) is one of the most endearing films to have come from the New Argentine Cinema. It’s a naturalistic portrait of a young urban woman who visits the small town of her youth and explores–through an assortment of casual, Rohmerian conversations–the ways in which things have changed. Murga’s followup …

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Los Angeles Film Festival Line-up

Commentary, Film festival

The Los Angeles Film Festival announced its line-up today, and any fears that its new director might steer the festival–with its solid line-up several years running–in an untoward direction have been put to rest. Some of the highlights follow.

The latest edition of the always excellent “The Films That Got Away” series programmed by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association:

• Musica Nocturna, described by Robert Koehler as “the most realistic depiction of a married couple that I’ve seen on screen since Cassavetes.”

• The Silence Before Bach, which I’ve been dying to see ever since it earned …

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Cannes Bloody Cannes

Commentary, Film festival


Drag Me to Hell (left); Enter the Void (top right); Thirst (bottom right)

By Robert Koehler

Lost amid the general, conventional sense of the Cannes competition lineup (see here) as a colloquium of auteurs–from Haneke to Campion, Audiard to Tsai, To to Resnais–is the fact that, for better or worse, the Palais will be the site of a bloodbath this year. There will be a whole lot of killers stalking around the lineup that Thierry Fremaux and Gilles Jacob have constructed. In his good rundown of all the sections announced today, complete with reference links, IFC Daily‘s David …

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Days in Buenos Aires: Lisandro Alonso

Film festival

By Robert Koehler

Was this the single most memorable image of the entire BAFICI? Perhaps. Just as Godard’s festival trailer for last year’s Viennale, Une Catastrophe, stamped the entire festival with the filmmaker’s own form of visual-audio music and sense of the Zeitgeist, so Lisandro Alonso’s BAFICI trailer, mysteriously titled S/T, seemed to stamp this edition of BAFICI. I would say that it’s the single greatest festival trailer I’ve ever seen: A close, static shot trained on an owl, in turn very much trained on the camera, its whole body undulating with the inhaling and exhaling of breath …

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