The Screengrab : film forum

The Rep Report (May 1 -- 6)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Those of you who've been meaning to catch up with your Stalin-era Russian light entertainments won't want to miss "Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova: First Lady of the Soviet Screen" at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (May 1-4). A celebrated stage performer who would eventually marry the director Grigori Aleksandrov, who, with Eisenstein, worked on the script of Strike, acted in Potemkin and assisted with the direction on October, Orlova was the sweetheart of the Soviet Union in such pictures as The Circus (1936), Jolly Fellows (1934), and Volga Volga. She died in 1975, but not before a small planet discovered by a Soviet astronomer had been named after her. Top that, Ginger Rogers!

If that's not enough to satisfy your pinko tastes, you can ride your hog over to Film Forum and stick it to the man by checking out the new restored 35-mm. print of Easy Rider. The critic David Thomson once ranked the blockbuster commercial success of Dennis Hopper's hippie dream among the greatest tragedies ever to befall the movies, and God knows that, from Peter Fonda's stoic Mr. Cool performance as Captain America to what may be the most overwrought trip sequence in the history of cinematic psychedelia (filmed in a New Orleans graveyard, where dead people were trying to sleep), it does not lack for sources of embarrassment for those who made it and anyone trying to watch it with their eyes uncrossed. Yet, as our own Sarah Clyne Sundberg noted here recently, it remains an excellent source of prime-period Jack Nicholson. And when Saint Nich's not onscreen, you can just close your eyes and listen to the best collection of counterculture-era rock that K-Tel never produced.

The Museum of Modern Art's Julien Duvivier retrospective begins today and runs though May 25. Duvivier may be best remembered here for the 1937 Pépé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin (and remade by Hollywood as Algiers, with Charles Boyer), and for good reason: it's a masterpiece of the genre that it helped to create, the poetic French melodrama. But the opening night selection, Poil de carotte (1932), is an unusual, beautiful childhood reverie that very different in some ways from most of the director's later work.

TORONTO: Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, opened last night and runs through May 10. The filma generating buzz include the boxing film Big John, Ashes of American Flags starring the band Wilco, the behind-the-scenes Asian stunt work film Action Boys, Winnebago Man, and Best Worst Movie, which nobody in Austin has been able to shut up about since last month's SXSW Festival.

PORTLAND: The Portland Documentary & eXperimental Film Festival, or "PDX Fest" for short, runs May 6 through the 10th. It kicks off with a loving memorial tribute to the late Bruce Connor.

The Rep Report (April 8 -- 14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: “Pictures from Life’s Many Sides: The Films of Jim McBride”, which runs April 8 through April 13, gives fans of the director Jim McBride, an affable figure who emerged from the '60s underground scene and who has won some attention for his work through the years without ever managing to parlay his successes into a sustained movie career, the chance to catch up with some of his least-seldom screened works. These include his debut, David Holzman's Diary, a prescient look at the dangers of eager aspiring filmmakers winding up with too much filming and not enough life; his hour-long "fictional documentary" My Girlfriend's Wedding (1969); the post-apocalyptic Glen and Randa (1971), featuring Shelley Plimpton and Garry Goodrow; and the 1974 softcore teen comedy Hot Times. There's also one of McBride's weirdest and most audacious flings as a Hollywood operator, the 1983 remake of Godard's Breathless, which, depending on who you ask, is either a garish travesty, the best showcase the young Richard Gere ever had for his self-infatuated strut, or both. The director himself is scheduled to appear Friday, April 10, to participate in a conversation with Jonathan Demme and L. M. Kit Carson, who starred in David Holzman's Diary and wrote Breathless.

For nine days starting April 8, Film Forum offers audiences a rare chance to see Masaki Kobayashi's legendary epic Thu Human Condition (1959-1961), a three-part, almost ten-hour long World War II film much celebrated for its scope and its central performance by Tatsuya Nakadai (whose brave, steady performance is all the more amazing considering that, during the extended filming process, he also appeared in a dozen other movies, including Kon Ichikawa's The Key, Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Film Forum is charging separate admissions for each of its long three parts, but if you're looking to save on cab fare, they are showing the whole thing back to back on Saturday, Sunday, and the the close of the engagement on Thursday, April 16.

The 16th Annual New York African Film Festival, running from April 8 through the 14th, includes 15 fifteen films from a continent that remains sorely underrepresented in the regular international distibution chain. The opening selection is Jihan El-Tahri's Behind the Rainbow, which uses the evolution of the relationship between two prominent ANC members, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, to trace the last few decades of South Africa's political history.

The Rep Report (February 20 - 26)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Film Comment Selects series (February 20 - March 5) offers the chance to catch up with a wide variety of movies, old and new, that have been judged as neglected by the country's leading serious movie magazine. This year, the recent stuff includes Michael Almereyda's latest dispatch from New Orleans, Paradise, Jean-Claude Brisseau's controversial A l’aventure, Paul Schrader's Holocaust-survivor story Adam Resurrected with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe, the South Korean thriller The Chaser (Chugyeogja), John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail, a doppelganger story starring Brendan Gleeson, and Lake Tahoe, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's follow-up to his small-scale charmer Duck Season. The older selections include some real buried gems, including two documentaries by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines: the notorious Demon Lover Diary, which is about the making of a zero-budget mid-1970s horror movie that ends with the documentary makers fleeing the scene in apparent fear for their lives from their subjects, one of whom mangled his hand so that he could use the insurance money to finance his movie and somehow arranged with Ted Nugent to use ol' Wango Tango's house for a location; and Seventeen, a look at teen culture in Muncie, Indiana that was made in 1983 for public television but deemed too raw for broadcast. There are also rare screenings of films by Situationist International founder Guy Debord and Robert Aldrich's seldom seen The Killing of Sister George.

Each weekend between now and the first week of April, starting tonight, the IFC Center will be having midnight screenings of a different film by David Cronenberg, including his first really big mainstream hit, 1986's The Fly (on March 6 and 7), but also with some out-of-the-way stuff. On February 27 and 28, IFC shows Spider, an adaptation of a Patrick McGrath novel starring Ralph Fiennes and a magnificent, jaw-dropping Miranda Richardson, that may be his best film of the decade and is almost certainly his most underappreciated.

Back in the days of studio musicals, Marni Nixon was the best-known off-screen singing voice in musicals. Nixon provided the high notes of Marilyn Monroe's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and dubbed the singing voices of Margaret O'Brien in The Secret Garden, Deborah Kerr in The King and I and An Affair to Remember, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. It was after that last film was released that Nixon, who received no on-screen credit for this work, became a celebrity and inspired a minor scandal when word leaked out of her contributions to the performances of non-singing stars in singing roles. She subsequently appeared on-screen as a singing nun in The Sound of Music; more recently, she supplied a voice for the Disney animated feature Mulan. On Monday, February 23, Nixon, who at 78 is still performing on-stage, will appear live at the Film Forum to promote her new autobiography, I Could Have Sung All Night. She'll be interviewed on-stage by the Film Forum's Bruce Goldstein and her co-writer, Stephen Cole.

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA: The tenth annual Nevermore Film Festival, a three-day celebration of "horror, gothic, & fantasy", starts today and runs through the weekend. A treat for genre fans, it's a chance to kick back and sample what the up-and-coming mad scientists have been brewing in theire labs, where horror junkies with low budgets and fevered brains try to bring something new and personal to the field even as the big studios are content to run off the thousandth xerox copy of a franchise that had worn out its welcome before the returns on its original installment were cold. (Yes, we're looking at you, Jason Voorhees.) This year's highlights include the trapped-in-a-supermarket thriller Alien Raiders and the moody, urban British ghost story The Disappeared. There are also old school screenings of such family friendly classics as James Whale's Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

BERKELEY: The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival runs at the Pacific Film Archives from February 25 -27. The festival aims to be "the leading showcase for committed and courageous films that open our eyes to a range of human rights issues around the globe", and this year's program includes some sharp and poetic treatments of those issues, among them Up the Yangtze, The Sari Soldiers, about women who participated in the Nepalese civil war; the Argentinean lament Our Disappeared; and the paranoia-inducing Secrecy.

The Rep Report (February 6 - 13)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The Film Forum's lollapallooza four-week series "Breadlines & Champagne" lays out an awesome spread of 1930s Hollywood entertainments that might come in handy if you're looking to get some tips on how to handle the death of your stock portfolio with a little grace. In Guy Maddin's nostalgia-drenched The Saddest Music in the World (2003), a brash player in the contest to select the titular song promises to deliver "sadness with some sass and pizazz", and that's how the best early talking pictures responded to hard times, whether it took the form of mixing romance with wisecracks and slapstick (as in My Man Godfrey and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living), hard-boiled tabloid melodrama (such as Night Nurse with Barbara Stanwyck and Three on a Match with a coke-crazed Ann Dvorak), and such varieties of escapism as the Mae West vehicle I'm No Angel and the bug-eyed Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933. Say hello to the bad guy with Little Caesar and the original Scarface; proclaim Hallelujah, I'm a Bum with an exuberant Al Jolson, and show up every Tuesday to participate in the free drawings as Film Forum revives the Depression tradition of Bank Night. These movies are reminders of a time when Americans saw themselves as all being in the soup together and managed to shave enough off the hard-won grocery money to come out to see movies that addressed their problems, both personal and societal, with an insouciant, nose-thumbing attitude and a can-do spirit. Of course, those Americans never dreamed that their great-grandhildren would someday queue up to pay twelve dollars for a movie ticket.

From February 6 through the 19th, Film Society of Lincoln Center remembers "Oscar Micheaux and Black Pre-War Cinema". Long a forgotten and even much-mocked figure, Micheaux has been unearthed in recent years as a pioneering African-American movie mogul and showman, a writer turned filmmaker who began his career with a film based on his own successful novel, The Homesteader. "Unhappily," the theater notes, "few of the films by Micheaux or his contemporaries—Spencer Williams, Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, William Alexander, and many others—have survived in pristine condition. The scratched, sometimes faded copies we’ll be showing are, for the moment, all that is available." But the fact that watching some of these movies now is like seeing something freshly recovered from a tomb may only enhance the alternative-universe-eye view that is part of their incalcuable historical value. Mixed in are some of the earliest attempts by white Hollywood to utilize the talent of black performers, including King Vidor's Hallelujah and Vincente Minnelli's endlessly enjoyable 1943 Cabin in the Sky, a pedestal to the sky-high talent of such entertainers as Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and the peerless song and dance man John W. Bubbles.

The Rep Report (January 2 - 9)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:15:00 GMT

CHICAGO: Beginning January 3 and running through March 2, "In the Realm of Oshima" at the Gene Siskel Film Center provides a twenty-film retrospective of the long career of one of Japan's most provocative directors, Nagisa Oshima. Here, Oshima is probably still best known for the scandalous international success (based on an actual story of violent sexual obsession) known here as In the Realm of the Senses (1976). The schedule includes that film as well as its companion piece, Empire of Passion, which won Oshima the Best Director prize at Cannes, the cult favorites Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and Death by Hanging (1968), and Oshima's sole bid to storm the multiplexes of America, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), a partly English-language prisoner-of-war-camp film with a cast that includes David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Takeshi Kitano.

NEW YORK: For one week starting today, Film Forum is running a fresh print of Nicholas Ray's 1956 Bigger Than Life, a hyperbolic film about megalomania that in recent years has begun to develop a cult following as a lonely, crazed voice screaming from the bland landscape of suburban '50s culture. James Mason tears it up as a schoolteacher whose cortisone addiction turns him into a rampaging, speechifying menace. "The sight of such deep-seated demons being liberated," writes Richard Brody in The New Yorker, "makes repression look downright appealing."

The Rep Report (December 26-January 4)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "Essential Sturges" at Film Forum crams a week's worth of the good stuff into what's left of the year, with a day after another of the funniest double bills ever offered to a city full of people in full need of a sanctuary from all the sorry weather. Also booked through January 1, but showing only at early-afternoon matinees: the 1941 Hoppity Goes to Town, the 84-minute animated feature that marked the end of the Fleischer Brothers' challenge to the Disney monopoly. It's an unusual movie that saw the Fleischers toning down the trademark anarchy and injecting more of the Disney cuteness into their mix in what now looks like a desperate attempt to stave off the collapse of their company. The attempt failed: pushed back from its original release date so as to avoid direct competition with Disney's Dumbo, the movie wound up being released two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that did little to whet America's appetite for the tuneful tale of a lovelorn grasshopper's attempts to save his community from human onslaught. The movie's failure led to the end of Fleischer Studios, leaving it behind as a little-seen relic from a remarkable time in the history of American animated films.

From December 26 through the 31st, Film Society of Lincoln Center offers "Scorsese Classics", a full plate of films by the city's favorite son that includes the early Who's That Knocking at My Door?, the breakthrough masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and more recent fare such as GoodFellas and Casino and the exhilarating Bob Dylan doc No Direction Home. Of special interest: the double bill of two short documentaries from the mid-70s that remain unavailable on DVD, the Scorsese family portrait Italianamerican and the jaw-dropping biography-by-monologue American Boy, starring Stephen Prince, who sold Travis Bickle his boom stick in Taxi Driver. Then starting on January 1, Lincoln Center passes the baton for "Under the Sign of Fincher", three days of David Fincher movies double billed with movies Fincher has selected as important to his development as a filmmaker, followed, on January 4, by a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and, for separate admission, a Q & A about its making between the director and critic Kent Jones. If nothing else, this is probably your only chance in this lifetime to see Se7en paired with Mary Poppins.

The Rep Report (November 14--21)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the late, great Manny Farber with the kind of celebration every film critic (every film nut, for that matter) has probably dreamed of being held in his honor: a couple week's worth of movies that inspired Farber to kick the theater seat in front of him in happy excitement, and to kick out the jams when he sat down to transfer that excitement to his writing about them. Any enthusiast of Farber's will notice something missing that's essential to their own conception of The Manny Farber Experience, but the programmers have certainly done an admirable job of indicating the wide range of Farber's taste, from the grungy crime movies (Howard Hawks's Scarface, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground) and suggestive scare flicks (the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie) and motor-mouthed comedies (His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July) that Farber pegged as the pride of old Hollywood to such art-house fare as Resnais's Muriel, Godard's Two or Three Things I know About Her, and experimental films by Michael Snow and Jean-Marie Straub. The double bill of the season just might be Don Siegel's The Lineup, a charged thriller based on a forgotten TV series and starring Eli Wallach as a demented hit man, with the classic Chuck Jones cartoon One Froggy Evening. This Sunday, the program also pairs up two short documentaries inspired by Farber's work: Chris Petit's 1999 Negative Space, which includes interviews with both Manny and his soul brother Dave Hickey, and Untitled: New Blue, Paul Schrader's five-minute look at one of Farber's paintings. Schrader will be on hand to introduce the film, and as an associate of Neil Young's once said of another associate of Neil Young's that boy can flat yap.

Film Forum begins a week-long tribute to director Les Blank, a documentarian whose range of subjects--mainly food, filmmaking, music, and wild women--clearly designate him as one of God's better ideas. Included are Blank's classic tribute to Mardi Gras Indians, Always for Pleasure (1978), whose title could also apply very nicely to his career, as could his 1968 God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance. Other films included cover the life and work of bluesmen Lightinin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Louisiana musicians CLifton Chenier and Michael Doucet, and Flaco Jimenez, as well as garlic, polka, Tex-Mex, and Werner Herzog, seen in the double bill Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is literally about what it says it's about. To gorge on this stuff is to come to a fresh understanding of just how thoroughly you've misspent most of your own life.

Also dropping in at the Forum for a week: Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style, in a spanking new 35-mm. print. Starring a celebrated graffiti artist, Lee Quinones, and shot in New York back in the day when the city had graffiti, Wild Style was a mainstay of cable TV's Night Flight in the late 1980s, and it seems to come back about once every ten years. To be honest, I've never been able to remain focused on it for all of its 82 minutes. But its hardcore fans don't worship at its altar because Ahearn was a master filmmaker or any kind of storyteller; they revere the movie, which includes glimpses of Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, the Cold Crush Brothers, artist Sandra Fabara, and onetime "downtown scene queen" Patti Astor, because it's a living record of a moment just before hip hop broke wide open, and because Ahearn had the taste, or the good luck, to capture that moment in a way that seemed to anticipate what was about to come. It's practically a federal law that any mention of the movie include the phrase "time capsule."

More pieces of time can be found at Anthology Film Archives, where they're kicking off an eight-film retrosepctive to 86-year-old director Arthur Penn, who I once referred to at this site as "the late" Arthur Penn, only to turn on TCM's Brando documentary to see him chattering away, still alive and looking more like Iggy Pop than ever. The AFA will be running his groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde as well as some of the less heralded earlier films that offer tantalizing hints of the triumphs to come--The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid and the excellent film version of The Miracle Worker, but also his film maudit and first collaboration with Warren Beatty, the fascinating, unclassifable failure Mickey One (1965)--and the ambitious, sometimes fumbling attempts to follow it up (Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves.)

BERKELEY: "Discovering Teuvo Tulio" (November 15-December 4) at Pacific Film Archives offers those looking for something different and obscure (in our neck of the woods, anyway) the chance to catch up on "the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s." Tulio was an actor in silent films, earning the designation "Finland's Valentino." According to the PFA, when Tulio turned director, "he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early 'haystack dramas,' Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic. The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP." Not having seen any of the four films in the program, I can't vouch for any of this, but it sure caught my attention. Apparently Aki Kaurismaki is a big fan, and for all I know, Tulio may turn out to be the Douglas Sirk to his Fassbinder. So if you love The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl and La Vie de Boheme--and if you don't, to hell with you, I say--here's your chance to see where their roots may lie.

DVD Digest/Rep Report Addendum: Corleone Family Muscles Its Way onto Blu-Ray and Houston Street

Phil Nugent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

There have been a lot of good movies made since 1972, sure 'nuff. But in the twenty-six years since Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather was released, to be followed two years later by The Godfather, Part II, no other movie that combined such seriousness of purpose and richness of entertainment value to deliver so essential a vision of American life has come close to monopolizing the box office, shaping the national conversation, and setting up a permanent residence in people's imaginations as that picture did. No brag, just fact. The movies--the original, the sequel, and also, um, that Part III thing where Pacino was made up as if to star in The Alice B. Toklas Story--make their latest appearance on DVD on September 23, which will also mark their first time on Blu-Ray HD. Since Coppola had no pressing offers to make Youth Without Youth, Part II, he had plenty of time to donate to the project, the fruits of which bear the official title The Coppola Restoration. The set includes a disc's worth of supplementary material, and it turns out that there are interesting observations to made even about the making of, um, that Part III thing.

Meanwhile, New York audiences should be pleased to know that the Film Forum is using the movies this year to ease the transition into fall, in newly restored prints that have received the personal Coppola seal of approval. Nice as it is to have the family installed in your home, nothing really compares to the experience of settling in a large dark room with a bunch of other lucky people, immersing yourself in the story of the Corleones, and then trooping back out onto the streets some hours later to discover that, you know, time has passed. Starting today, they're running the original for a week, after which Part II will play from September 19-25. Then, for marathon viewers, there will be the chance to roll in and see both movies (separate admissions, let's get real here) from September 26 to October 2. These are long damn movies, which cuts down on how many times they can be run in a single work day, which in turn cuts into the business at the concession stand, so Film Forum deserves an even heartier tip of the hat for this that they do most days for just being there, the Manhattan film freak's equivalent of an amber field of grain. Sadly, various factors such as common sense have dictated that the Forum will not be showing Part III as part of this gala event, but word on the street is that if you slip the popcorn girl a ten-spot (six dollars for members), she'll act it out for you if the line's not too long. I always tear up at her re-enactment of the scene where the meeting of the heads of the organized crime families is strafed by Joey Zaza's helicopter assassin squad.

The Rep Report (September 12--19)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: If you've ever wondered why Robert Downey, Jr. keeps that "junior" in his name, it's because, once upon a time, when Downey was starting out in the mid-1980s, it still seemed prudent to make it easier for casting directors to figure out that he was not his own father, a man who until recently did not have to be advertised as "Robert Downey, Sr." In the 1960s, Downey the Elder made a string of low-budget satirical comedies, notably Babo 73 (1964), which starred underground cinema mainstay Taylor Mead and 1965's Chafed Elbows, arguably the first "underground" to receive a significant measure of commercial and critical success. Though he had an almost-mainstream hit with 1969's Putney Swope, he pretty much dropped off the radar after 1972's Greaser's Palace. (In between, he made the 1970 Pound, which is set in one, and which features Robert Downey the Younger's film debut. He played a puppy.) But while most of his later feature-film work made it to home video in the 1980s--even Up the Academy, the infamous (and disowned) attempt to start a Mad magazine movie franchise to compete with the National Lampoon--those early-'60s films just dropped off the face of the Earth, and were generally assumed to have been lost.. Now Anthology Film Archives is bringing them back for a week's run. Bruce Bennett at New York Sun has the story of how Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation got on board with the project of restoring Downey's early work. It is reported that Downey, upon learning that Martin Scorsese agreed that it was worth putting up the "small fortune" necessary to restore these films because of their cultural significance, had a quick answer: "Has he seen them?"

Film Forum, in association with the BFI, commences a two-week tribute to David Lean on Friday. Yeah, Lawrence of Arabia and the other late epics are made for the big screen, but for some of us, the really choice news here is that many of Lean's finely crafted, early entertainments are brought together, many in handsome new prints. The program kicks off perfectly with the Dickens-adaptation double feature: Great Expectations, a rousing entertainment that famously inaugurated Lean's lifelong partnership with Alec Guinness (seen here in the role of Herbert Pocket), and Oliver Twist, in which Guinness actually caused the movie some problem with Jewish groups for his alarmingly faithful embodiment of Dickens's Fagin. There's also the chance to see Charles Laughton tear it up with a splendidly undomesticated performance in the domestic comedy Hobson's Choice, Noel Coward perfect the stiff upper lip in the wartime propaganda film In Which We Serve, and Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard take out a patent on the masochistic romantic agony of shared self-denial in Brief Encounter. A word to the wise: if it's epic you're after, take a pass on the latest drive to "re-evaluate" Lean's misbegotten 1970 waste of time Ryan's Daughter and, instead, check out his last film, the sumptuous, brilliantly acted 1984 version of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

LOS ANGELES: The 12th Annual Latino International Film Festival, one of the pre-eminent opportunities for Latino filmmakers to show their work to audiences in the U.S., runs September 12 through the 19th. The 132-film program ranges from the popular and timely Colombian drama Paraiso Travel to music documentary profiles of Celia Cruz and Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

The Rep Report (August 7-12)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: "The French Crime Wave: Film Noir Thrillers, 1937-2000" at Film Forum, runs August 8 through September 11. The programmers' definition of "thrillers" is pretty loose: it includes not just Henri-Georges Clouzot's great existential nailbiter The Wages of Fear but Robert Besson's existential and ascetic Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, as well as the pure horror poetry of Eyes without a Face. But then the French do take their crime literature seriously. One of the charms of the schedule is the chance to see what the work of a number of famous thriller writers--including Jim Thompson (whose Pop. 1280 and A Hell of a Woman provided the basis for, respectively. Bertrand Tavernier's Clean Slate and Alain Corenau's Serie Noire), Patricia Highsmith (whose The Talented Mr. Ripley was turned into Rene Clement's Purple Noon), and Cornell Woolrich (Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid) looked like after a pass through the French film hopper. The series is dedicated to honorary French director Jules Dassin (b. Middletown, Connecticut), who died last March at the age of 96, and who kicks things off with his influential 1955 caper film Rififi.

Over the course of the last dozen years, the Dardenne brothers have built up a remarkable body of films that address hard questions with intellectual and moral seriousness and with a rigorous filmmaking approach that is never condescending and usually aesthetically stimulating. Starting Thursday and running through the weekend, Anthology Film Archives is showing the films that put and kept them on the world film map: La Promesse, Rosetta, The Child, and perhaps their most extraordinary work, The Son.

The Rep Report (May 2--8)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Though it's not clear just how widespread this information was among the average moviegoers of the day, in retrospect it's only become clearer and clearer that Jean-Luc Godard owned the 1960s. None of the gazillions of filmmakers who tried to copy or emulate him at the time found a way to do it without looking ridiculous, and Godard himself has spent the last forty-odd years wondering why nobody believes him when he insists that his later work is much better. Deal with it: Godard's sixties movies, which began with the 1959 Breathless and ended with the 1968 Weekend, which ends with the words "End of Cinema" and which was followed by, of course, more movies, amount to an enduring alternate history of their period, one caught on the fly, and seemingly composed and moods and signals snatched from the air. They are completely of their moment and haven't really dated, and they pointed in a direction that no one has really been able to follow, Godard included. Starting today and continuing through June 5, Film Forum has the whole kicking, biting, flirting package, including the first of Godard's post-Godardian films, the 1969 Le Gai Savoir, and Sympathy for the Devil, which really doesn't belong in this company but has to be included in any comprehensive salute to Godard and the 1960s, 'cause it's got Rolling Stones in it. If you're looking for a place to escape to as summer comes clanking in, this might be the place.

Peter Hutton is a landscape specialist with a moving camera. A former art student, he has traveled the world, sometimes while working as a merchant seaman, recording his visual impressions of Southeast Asia, of the sea, of New York City in the 1970s and Hungary in the 1980s and communal living in Southern California and the Hudson River Valley, turning out a string of transcendentally beautiful, singular films that document his way of seeing. From May 5 through the 26th, the Museum of Modern Artpresents a career retrospective of Hutton's work, which should be eye-opening even for the lucky folks who've managed to have seen some of it. It opens with a "conversation" between the filmmaker and writer Luc Sante.

Rep Report Addendum: 90 Years' Worth of United Artists at Film Forum

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

United Artists may have been the first major American film studio to be set up, back in 1919, in some kind of spirit of. . . if not utopianism, then at least something other than outright hostile opposition to the people on the creative end. It was the people on the creative end who set it up — four of them, to be precise — D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford — with an eye towards distributing their own movies, and accounts of its founding that sought out the opinion of their rival studio heads tended to be long of images of asylums taken over by the inmates, that sort of thing. Originally each member of the original triumvirate was supposed to help the studio make its nut by turning out four films a year, which might not have been such a crackpot idea at one point, but Griffith and Chaplin and Fairbanks were beginning to think bigger and bigger on projects that they fussed over for longer and longer periods, and none of them were getting any younger, and it wasn't long before other filmmakers were being invited to make films for UA. In the 1950s, producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin took it over, with Chaplin and Pickford's blessings. (Fairbanks and Griffith had died by then.) As Dave Kehr notes, "Because United Artists did not feel constrained by the moral strictures of the Production Code, it was able to move quickly as social mores changed in the 1960s." In the fifties, working with a succession of independent producers, the studio had greenlit movies that defied censorship codes and conventional attitudes such as The Manchurian Candidate, Sweet Smell of Success, and Kiss Me Deadly. In the 1960s, they produced Midnight Cowboy, the first movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after having been given an X rating by the MPAA. (They also developed a lucrative sideline in English-speaking imports, such as the British films Tom Jones — another Oscar winner for Best Picture — A Hard Day's Night, and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, as well as the dubbed versions of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.

In the 1970s, UA's faith in risk-taking filmmakers made possible such Renaissance-era classics as Last Tango in Paris, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Thieves Like Us, and Annie Hall, but this approach, led them grief: at a precarious time in the company's fortune, around the time that Krim, Benjamin, and CEO Eric Pleskow noisily broke away to form their own company, Orion, Michael Cimino showed up at UA's door with a script called Heaven's Gate and a request for enough rope, and the confused, inexperienced new UA bosses gave him enough to hang half the directors in Los Angeles. Cimino's baby, which premiered in the same season that produced the studio's last proud moment, Raging Bull, sank United Artists, which wound up being picked up by MGM, which coveted its distribution apparatus. For much of the time since then, UA has amounted to a handful of franchise rights (mainly to the Pink Panther and James Bond) in search of a studio, but last year it became a play toy for Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner. Starting today and running through May 1, Film Forum honors the good old days with a mammoth retrospective that includes all the films listed above — well, except for Heaven's Gate; I mean, would you invite the guy who killed your kids to your wedding anniversary? — including other delights, including key films by the original big four: Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, Way Down East, and Broken Blossoms; Chaplin's City Lights and Modern Times; Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad, The Mask of Zorro, and Robin Hood; and Mary Pickford's Sparrows and My Best Girl.

The Rep Report (March 12-19)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the centennial of Rex Harrison. Tall, crisp, and capable of being snide and downright nasty in a way that only enhanced his seductiveness, nobody did sly like sexy Rexy. The programming, which mixes camp giggles such as Cleopatra and King Richard and the Crusaders with prestige bloat-a-thons such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and My Fair Lady, may be too true a picture of how much of this time on movie soundstages was not ideally spent, but the important thing is that it does include his most wonderful film performance in his greatest movie, the beyond-suave superstar conductor whose jealous suspicions towards his young wife (Linda Darnell) turn him into a whirling dervish in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), the director's heh-heh "commercial" movie, returns to the Film Forum for a two-week run, from March 14-27. Produced by Carlo Ponti and the uncredited Joseph E. Levine, with a cast led by Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance (as an overbearing movie producer), and Fritz Lang as his own bad self, working from the base of a best-selling Alberto Moravia novel and with an actual budget, Godard contrived to turn out one of the strangest and orneriest movies of his not exactly self-effacing career. Long considered a weird misfire, the movie inspired a number of Godard-watchers and other movie lovers to reconsider its qualities after it was revived at the Forum back in 1997; maybe this is going to become some kind of once-a-decade revival rituals. Terrence Rafferty recently used this latest engagement to grapple with the picture in the pages of The New York Times.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Infernal Machines: The Films of Kim Ki-Young" (March 12 – 18) tips its hat to a maverick Korean filmmaker whose work made him a inspiration to many of the newer directors who have been behind the current Korean New Wave. Richard Pena describes him as an "instinctual artist" who "always seems ready to abandon correct or tasteful form for a powerful visual or aural effect. The rawness of the emotions on screen is more than matched by the directness of his cinematic style." Kim's audacity as a filmmaker may have been too much for the Korean film industry, which basically drove him out of the business by the mid-1980s. He was rediscovered and even returned to filmmaking in the mid-1990s but died in 1998.

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.

The Rep Report (February 7--14)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Over the course of a remarkably long career, Sidney Lumet has taken a crack at directing just about every kind of movie, while making a certain kind of film — the high-energy, acting-centered New York melodrama — his own. Last year he enjoyed a bit of a comeback with his 44th feature film, Before the Devil Know You're Dead, so the career retrospective at the Film Forum that kicks off this Friday with the 1976 Network couldn't be more timely. Highlights include Long Day's Journey into Night starring Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, the greatest production of Eugene O'Neill ever caught on film and the high point of Lumet's sideline as a TV-trained specialist in filming plays; The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes, and The Offense, all of which feature powerfully charged performances by Sean Connery, an actor who Lumet was prescient in seeing as having the potential to be more than James Bond; and of course the two "based on a true story" films co-starring Al Pacino and the city of New York, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, which had such an impact that Lumet and his star could have practically taken out a copyright on Fun City in the seventies. Also, from 1939: One Percent of a Nation, a little-seen, independently produced New York film that includes the only record of the director's work as an actor. (He was fifteen at the time.) On Monday, February 11, the director will appear in person to discuss his career in "An Evening with Sidney Lumet", to be moderated by historian Foster Hirsch.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 10, the Museum of the Moving Image will host "A Tribute to St. Clair Bourne", in honor of the documentary filmmaker, who died last December. The critic Armond White, film and literary scholar Clyde Taylor, Black Enterprise columnist George Alexander, and journalist and poet Esther Iverem will discuss the filmmaker's career and show clips of his work.

PORTLAND: The 31st Annual International Portland Film Festival opens Thursday, February 7 and runs through the 23rd, offering more than two weeks worth of jam-packed programming of feature films and shorts from around the world, in the city that Scott Favor and Bob Pigeon were proud to call home.

The Rep Report (February 1-7)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Since last Thanksgiving, Village audiences have been turning out in force at the Film Forum for I'm Not There, so the theater shouldn't have too much trouble drawing an audience for a week-long showing (February 1-7) of D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, the documentary record of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the United Kingdom, complete with Joan Baez singing away in her own little bubble, Dylan's notorious manager Albert Grossman auditioning for Tony Hendra's role in This Is Spinal Tap (and maybe Joe Pesci's role in GoodFellas), drop-in appearances by Donovan and Alan Price, and one of the all-time great pre-MTV music videos, with Dylan standing in the street flipping cue cards while Allen Ginsberg standing off to the sidelines looking as if he knows deep and ancient truths, even if he was really just wondering about the location of the buffet table. Released in 1967, Pennebaker's movie established Dylan as an icon of movie cool, much more effectively than his early attempts at actual movie "acting" (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Renaldo and Clara). If you've never seen it, you'll want to check it out to decide for yourself how the man himself compares with Cate Blanchett.

On February 1, as part of its "Golden Silents" program, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a special one-night event, a rare screening of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a 1927, sixty-seven-minute film by the men who made King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The simple story about a family farm in a jungle setting is a pretext for the exciting natural wildlife footage; the movie includes fights with big cats and a bang-up elephant stampede — make no mistake, animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. But its mixture of awe in the face of natural beauty and man-on-safari edginess will help you understand why everyone in Hollywood understood that the jungle-raping showman in King Kong was a Cooper self-portrait. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the Alloy Orchestra.

The Rep Report (January 2-17)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: From January 2 through the 17th, Film Forum hosts a retrospective of the films of the once-ever-present, still-controversial Otto Preminger. Things kick off, fittingly, with the classic noir Laura (double -billed with the Joan Crawford vehicle Daisy Kenyan), followed by a new restored print of the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder and a matched double bill of thrillers capturing Preminger at his seamiest: Angel Face, with the aristocratic Jean Simmons eager to sully herself with a bemused Robert Mitchum, and Fallen Angel, with Dana Andrews itching for Linda Darnell. (The theater will not be following Preminger into the depths of the last fifteen years of his career, but anyone curious to see just how unmoored he had become by 1968 might want to supplement the program with some homework in the form of a rare TV screening of the hippie head trip Skidoo, airing at 2 AM (EST) Friday night/a> as part of Turner Classic Movies' "Underground" series.)

Film Society at Lincoln Center's Dance on Camera Festival (January 2–6, 11 and 18–19) includes a wide range of dance films from around the world, including works by Pina Bausch and Jacques Tati.

Those who've just gotten their first taste of the world as seen through the eyes of maverick filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson via There Will Be Blood can find out where he's been all their lives with the Museum of the Moving Image's weekend screening of Anderson's first four films, from Hard Eight (or Sydney, as he'd much rather you'd call it) to Punch Drunk Love. We can't guarantee that they'll emerge feeling certain that you know just what he's been doing all their lives, but we hope they'll enjoy the ride anyway.

LOS ANGELES: "The Films of Lee Chang-dong" (January 3 - 5) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art gives local audiences a chance to get acquainted with a South Korean director whose four films have, with the exception of 2002's Oasis, received no real distribution in the U.S. (However, his most recent film, Secret Sunshine, is South Korea's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture and recently came in first in IndieWIRE's critics' poll devoted to undistributed films.) Lee will be in attendance at the screenings.

CHICAGO: The Gene Siskel Film Center devotes two months, from January 5 to March 4, to the taboo-busting Japanese director Shohei Imamura, showing eighteen of his features, "many in specially imported prints from Japan." The schedule includes such classics as Vengeance Is Mine, Black Rain, The Ballad of Narayama and The Insect Woman, but it is especially notable for being crammed with many titles that remain seldom screened and little known in the U.S.

The Rep Report (December 19 - January 1)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:13:00 GMT

NEW YORK: At Warner Bros. during the prime days of the studio system, Joan Blondell was the platonic ideal of the wisecracking dame, always a pal to the heroine or the hero, hard-working and always dependably lively and funny and likable. She never became a star in her own right, but she was one of those performers who audiences came to be grateful for, knowing that even in bad pictures, she could be counted on to provide some entertaining relief from the dull center of the movie. She kept working long enough to appear in the 1977 John Cassavettes film Opening Night and inspire Seymour Krim to call her "the last of the great troupers." In a move guaranteed to get them on Santa's good side, the Museum of Modern Art pays her tribute with "Joan Blondell: The Bombshell from Ninety-First Street", running from December 19 through January 1. The schedule of golden oldies includes a couple of her many collaborations with James Cagney, including the Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade — remember, the baby Jesus cries whenever anyone blows off a chance to see Cagney dance — and such choice, juicy Pre-Code melodramas as Night Nurse (1931), with Joan advising Barbara Stanwyck on how to deal with a household terrorized by a violent, sexually mesmeric Clark Gable, and Three on a Match (1932), in which Humphrey Bogart grins and mimes rubbing something under his nose to tip off the hipsters in the audience as to why Ann Dvorak is acting so tense and hysterical and looking even more wide-eyed than usual. The schedule also includes the 1947 carny noir Nightmare Alley, featuring the older, irresistibly blowzy Joan in one of her best later roles as the fortune teller Zeena, who tutors Tyrone Power in the dark arts of fleecing the suckers, with results that bring happiness to no one.

Terry Zwigoff's snarly black comedy Bad Santa has been a classic showcase for Billy Bob Thornton at his least family-friendly ever since it first lurched into view in 2003. Now, the IFC Center pulls off a seasonal coup with the theatrical premiere of the "director's cut", which was released on DVD last year. Zwigoff's preferred edit--not to be confused with the "unrated" version released on DVD as Badder Santa, which is not that easy to tell from the original theatrical version--is actually shorter than the studio cut and, in what is by now a time-honored tradition with director's cuts, dispenses with the introductory voice-over narration. But any version of this thing is still a hoot.

Film Forum is playing Charles Chaplin's City Lights, starting Christmas Day and running through New Year's. For those who can't imagine Christmas or Chaplin without sentimentality, this may be the greatest of his features and something of a holiday classic even though it isn't about the holidays. Those who have to gnash their teeth a little to put up with the story about how the poor little guy martyrs himself to bring the gift of sight to a blind girl who wouldn't give him the time of day if she could see him may be pleasantly surprised at how much real comic brilliance is mixed in there with all the mush.

The Rep Report (November 2 - 20)

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: From November 2 through the 20th, Film Forum brings back Jean-Jacques Beinex's 1981 romantic comedy-thriller Diva, in a new 35 mm. print. As visually graceful as it is inventive, playfully witty, with actual if improbable characters pushing the plot forward, it remains an especially flavorful example of what used to be called "an exercise in pure style" from back before easy access to computer imagery and MTV syntax resulted in an explosion of would-be prodigies turning out movies that really are exercises in pure style. The new print is reported to also boast some new, improved subtitles. (The first time I saw the movie, on cable TV on my fifteenth birthday — I rode my brontosaurus to the house of my friend who had HBO — a single half-assed glitch in the subtitles served to completely screw up the plot.) If you haven't seen it before, nothing else you have seen can fully prepare you for it; Beinex himself has spent the last quarter century failing to follow it up.

October 30 would have been Louis Malle's seventy-fifth birthday, which makes this a good time to check out what may be his happiest masterpiece, the autobiographical 1971 comedy Murmur of the Heart. (I do not mean to suggest that there might ever be a bad time to check it out.) The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be showing it on November 1 as part of their "Young Friends of Film" program. Andre Gregory, who worked with Malle on two of his finest American films, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street, will be on hand to introduce the film.

BERKELEY: Romanian cinema, believe it or not, is hot right now and getting hotter, so Pacific Film Archives is offering a handy primer in the form of Revolutions in Romanian Cinema (November 3 - December 9). The country produces fewer feature films than any other European country — half a dozen a year — but as Spencer Tracy used to say, what's there is choice. The schedule includes The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the Cannes festival winner that really got the West paying attention, as well as the sardonic 12:08 East of Bucharest and the powerful recent New York Film Festival entry 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days. Plus five other feature films and a program of shorts.

The Pacific Film Archive also hosts The Passion of Pasolini (November 1 - December 7), dedicated to the work of the still-controversial Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The series, which includes his adaptations of The Decameron, Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales and The Gospel According to St. Matthew opens with his 1961 debut feature Accattone; it closes with his scandalous last film, the 1975 Salo. Just keep telling yourself: it's only chocolate, it's only chocolate. . .

WASHINGTON, D.C.: The twentieth annual 2007 European Union Film Showcase opens November 1 and runs through November 20th at the AFI Silver Theater, showcasing a wide selection of new and recent films from across the continent. The opening night selection is Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, the latest by the startlingly prolific Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. The director, who will be in attendance, turns ninety-nine on December 12. I just thought I'd put that out there in case you want to show up and give him his birthday card a little early.

— Phil Nugent