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MUBI and Film Comment updates

Film festival, Site news

For the past few weeks, I’ve been attending screenings and watching screeners from the Los Angeles Film Festival, and my summary of most of the eighteen films I’ve seen has been posted at MUBI today.

Also, the new issue of Film Comment is coming out, and it names me as two of the Top Film Criticism Sites on the web for Film Journey and Masters of Cinema, the latter less a news source now than a specialty DVD label, but in its unfunded, pre-Web 2.0 days, it was something I was proud to edit.

Paul Brunick’s article prefacing …

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Downtown Independent (Cont’d)

Film festival

By Robert Koehler

(Click on thumbnails for larger pictures.)

The lobby of Downtown Independent, where the first New Media film festival played Friday through Sunday, June 11-13. The festival is one of the first to be located purely at Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main St., located on the west side of Main between 2nd and 3rd and the only independently run cinema in downtown Los Angeles.

As ImaginAsian, the venue struggled, but reconfigured as a home to a broad range of independent cinema wedged somewhere between a more commercial house like the Nuart and a microcinema like Cinefamily at …

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Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take

Film review

By Robert Koehler

Following the New Media Film Festival screening last night at Downtown Independent in downtown Los Angeles, festival programming director Noel Lawrence (center) moderates a very new media panel discussion on Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating film on Hitchcock, doubling, paranoia, the Cold War and catastrophe culture, Double Take. In the foreground to the right is co-editor Tyler Hubby, who discussed the process of working for five solid months with Grimonprez during his residency at the Hammer Museum, where they culled UCLA Film Archive footage of everything from episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, rare promotional footage of The …

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Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Film review, Special event

LACMA is halfway through its series devoted to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, one of RKO’s prime cameramen in the 1940s and ’50s, and thus one of the key strategists behind the shadowy “noir” look in films such as Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Clash by Night (1952). But for me, the big discovery has been Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a movie that has managed to completely escape my notice over the years despite the fact that it’s sometimes credited as being the first American film noir.

I write “American,” because …

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Predicting Your Taste

Texts

One of the freelancing hats I wear these days is graphic design for the California Institute of Technology’s award-winning Engineering & Science magazine, and its latest issue contains a really fascinating article on the Netflix Prize contest (2006-’09) that awarded a million dollars to the person/team who best improved the company’s algorithm for predicting its user ratings.

I’m sure most readers here have received their fair share of movie predictions from any number of websites, ranging from the accurate to the absurd. A few months ago, Amazon.com actually sent me this email: “As someone who has purchased or rated The …

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Jafar Panahi is Released

Special event

Jafar Panahi, happy to be home. (Photo courtesy of the Twitter group FreeJafarPanahi.)

“I think Panahi’s refusal to cooperate with [the authorities] prolonged the case,” Jamsheed Akrami says in Godfrey Cheshire’s summary of events. “They just realized they couldn’t intimidate Panahi. I consider that to be a great moral victory for Panahi and people like him. We have a lot of them in Iran. But they are not as well known as Panahi, and are sadly paying much heavier prices.”…

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