Latest Posts

PSIFF diary 2

Film festival



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 …

Read more

PSIFF diary 1

Film festival


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 …

Read more

Le moindre geste

Film review

A few recent gems from France:

Screenville‘s Harry Tuttle has sent in his enticing review (perhaps the first in English) of the recently-restored Le Moindre geste, a film with a complex, 40-year history that just received its official release in France.

And Franck Poncelet wrote us at Masters of Cinema about a real find, the DVD release of 1963’s Un Roi sans divertissement (A King Without Distraction), a film directed by FranÁois Letterier, the lead “model” of Bresson’s 1956 A Man Escaped. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t contain English subtitles, but Poncelet assures us that “like good …

Read more

Best of 2004

Commentary, Film review


Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow

I’ve been traveling a bit during the holidays, and combined with the devastating news of world disaster, it has been difficult to blog about movies the past couple of weeks. Now that the new year has begun, however, and Los Angeles seems especially prepped for good screenings the next few weeks (including the Palm Springs IFF and retrospectives of Graham Greene, Maurice Pialat, Guy Maddin, Von Stroheim, Von Sternberg/Dietrich), I will be posting regularly again.

First up is my top ten lists for 2004, and I should note that these are all films …

Read more

PSIFF catalogue, end-of-year

Site news

I haven’t been blogging much this week because I’ve been tapped to furiously write catalogue entries for the Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 6-17), my favorite festival in the Los Angeles vicinity because it intentionally screens all 50-odd international films submitted to AMPAS that are invariably and clumsily reduced to five random nominees in the Foreign Language category on Oscar night. And it screens much more than that: the past few years have allowed me to see such films as The Son, To Be and To Have, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Distant, and The Story of …

Read more

American Film Archives

DVD review


Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been slowly sampling one of the most entertaining–and important–DVD releases of the year, the National Film Preservation Foundation‘s More Treasures From the American Film Archives box set of (mostly) silent films from 1894 to 1931. (A previous collection was released in 2000.) It’s 50 films totaling over nine hours of material spread out over three discs, and each film contains a very informative, multi-screen essay, a new score, and typically an audio commentary by one of the 17 participating critics, historians, and preservationists.

While a number of silent features …

Read more