Category: Film festival

Pin Boy (Parapalos)

My brief, several-day stint at the San Francisco International Film Festival turned out to be a great reunion with friends but an extremely lackluster screening experience. And I’m not the only person who apparently felt this way–the SF Weekly questioned how an “international film festival” could be be 40% American films, and groaned at the fest’s motto (“Every Film is a Foreign Film Somewhere”), which only seemed to rub it in.

Ten films, two incontestably good ones and one interesting mood piece, summarize my take, although I should note that the festival continues for another …

Hawaii, Oslo (Erik Poppe, Norway)

The last film I’ll review for the PSIFF is perhaps my favorite, and solidifies the strong Scandinavian presence at the festival this year. The last couple of years have produced a number of ensemble films offering post-Altman, interwoven stories (two examples are Germany’s Lichter [Distant Lights] and Peru’s What the Eye Doesn’t See) but Hawaii, Oslo is the latest and most impressive of the bunch. It has been an enormous popular success in Norway, Variety has called it “one of the best Norwegian films made in many years,” and it’s the country’s …

Forgiveness

More from PSIFF…

Breath (Sandeep Sawant, India)

Told with vivid emotional clarity like the best of mainstream Indian cinema, this debut by director Sawant (filmed in the cinematically-rare Marathi dialect) is a deeply compelling story about a rural boy and his grandfather who travel to a city for medical treatment. The boy is suffering from serious vision impairment and their confused interactions with the modern medical establishment and growing awareness of the severity of the boy’s condition are truly riveting thanks to exceptionally convincing performances from the entire cast. Regecting simplistic melodrama, Sawant keeps the narrative brisk and the …

Cold Light

More from the Palm Springs International Film Festival:

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)

Weerasethakul’s latest film is one of the best puzzle films I’ve seen in years: a brilliantly cinematic depiction of supressed sexual desire carefully alluded to through the suggestive body language between two young men (a lackadaisacal worker and a soldier on leave) and its evocative juxtaposition of night and day, urban and rural, civilization and nature, narrative and non-narrative. The first part of the film basically follows the implicitly erotic friendship between the two men as they explore the city and surrounding nature; the film …

Strings

Palm Springs may be famous as a desert resort, but I’m writing this as I wait in line at the city’s annual film festival, huddled under an awning while rain pours down around me. Not that I mind; I’m enjoying the Southern California deluge this year and it enshrouds the surrounding mountains in a beautiful mist–it also keeps the rush lines shorter than usual.

Summarizing my Friday night and Saturday viewing (with more to come this week):

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, Germany)

Despite the fact that this has swept German awards, I found it to be a fairly average ensemble …

One of my favorite unreleased movies from last year was Ross McElwee’s essay film Bright Leaves, and just as the film ends its one-week run in Los Angeles this week, Russell Lucas has sent in his glowing review from the Three Rivers Film Festival in Pittsburgh. Here’s hoping for imminent video distribution, at least. –Doug

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By Russell Lucas

A dozen or more times in my life I’ve been in the midst of an experience so overwhelmingly beautiful and satisfying that I began to regret on the spot that the experience couldn’t last, that the clock …