Category: Site news

In a couple of days, I’ll be headed to New York City to attend this year’s Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, who selected me as one of a dozen participating journalists, and they’ve just updated their website with the final schedule, list of participants, etc.

With the demise of so many newspaper and magazine film critical positions, and the continual growth of serious film writing and discussion on the Internet, this is an interesting time to be reviewing the state of the art, particularly at an event sponsored by the New York Times. I’m sure this …

Longtime readers of Filmjourney.org may have noticed a decisive lag in posts of late, and the reason is quite simple: my first child, Alexandra Anne Cummings, entered the world two weeks ago, and has been pretty greedy with my time. But we’re settling into a life pattern and the blogging here should resume with more frequency shortly. (Expect a lot of DVD reviews for a few months!)

In the meantime, enjoy Robert Koehler’s exciting posts (as time permits) from the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and feel free to check out a series of short posts on animation I’m publishing over …

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)

“Now that rampaging dinosaurs, epic catastrophes, and superheroes have become ubiquitous in movies, animation seems as commonplace as news footage. But animation is as old photography itself; it predates ‘motion pictures’ through a variety of Victorian contraptions. And its practitioners were often the most solitary and obsessive filmmakers–visionaries who painstakingly granted the illusion of life to an astonishing array of materials, and devoted years of labor to producing a few moments of flickering movement. Animators are cinemaís original Frankensteins. . . .”

The new issue of the Utne-nominated ads-free indie …

It’s always nice to see one’s name in print–from the latest Film Comment:

“Launched in 2001, Masters of Cinema is run by an eclectic group hailing from the U.S., Canada and England: Jan Bielawski, Doug Cummings, R. Dixon Smith, Trond S. Tronsen, and Nick Wrigley. So which masters tie this collective together? Many celebrated auteurs, but from the beginning it seems there was one sanctified quartet: Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Dreyer. Check out the eminently useful worldwide DVD release calendar posted on the sharply designed home page and explore four years’ worth of DVD of the Year readers’ polls. …

My TIFF buddy Ken Morefield and I informally chatted on the phone about Blade Runner: The Final Cut for an intervew he has posted at Matthew’s House Project, delving into such issues as directors’ cuts, human values, and science fiction.

Apart from that, I’m immersed in writing up film descriptions for this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival catalogue; the full line-up should be announced on December 23. Anyone else planning to attend?

And on a personal note, I’ve just had to painfully turn down an invitation to be an official guest of the Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival…