Alternative Film Guide

In Strange Culture, which was released on DVD this past March 25, filmmaker Lynn Hershman-Leeson tackles the bizarre case of Steve Kurtz, an associate professor of art at SUNY/Buffalo and founding member of the award-winning art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble, whose interactive projects include the examination of biotechnology and the issues surrounding it. [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film will acknowledge John Huston himself with a special screening of his controversial World War II documentary classics San Pietro (aka The Battle of San Pietro) (above, 1944) and Let There Be Light (1946), on Tuesday, April 15, at 7:30 p.m. at [...]

21 played its cards right this weekend, seizing the top spot at the North American box office with US$23.7 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Released by Sony Pictures and directed by Robert Luketic, the crime drama stars newcomer Jim Sturgess as a gifted MIT student whose car-counting techniques help him cash in at Vegas’ [...]

The video below, posted on youtube by khmerboyz148, is from the Cambodian film Jumno Phoum Bakprea. (Translation??) I couldn’t find it listed on the IMDb, and I found precious little info about it online.
I’d never seen a Cambodian production before, so this clip was worth a look. Also, I can’t recall ever seeing [...]

Below is a music video — "Les Enfants du Pays - Douce France" — a faster-paced, multiethnic adaptation of Charles Trenet’s old song (with music by Léo Chauliac) posted by niko6907 on youtube. (Outside of France, Trenet is probably best known for the romantic ballad "La Mer," which became Bobby Darin’s "Beyond the Sea.")
I much [...]

Emma Brockes reviews Julie Andrews‘ Home: A Memoir of My Early Years in the International Herald Tribune:
"Julie Andrews’s memoir is full of crisp locutions like ‘poor unfortunate’ and ‘banished to the scullery’ and ‘trivet,’ a characteristically precise term that the dictionary defines as ‘an iron tripod placed over a fire for a cooking pot or [...]

The 22nd London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival kicked off last night with a screening of Alek Keshishian’s romantic comedy Love and Other Disasters (which will screen again on Sat., March 29), starring Brittany Murphy, Matthew Rhys, Catherine Tate, Stephanie Beacham, Dawn French, and Richard Wilson.
Among the highlights of London’s L&G film festival on [...]

Béla Tarr will not be attending tonight’s screening of The Man from London at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Béla Tarr retrospective, which began earlier this month, comes to a close this evening.
In Screen Daily, Jonathan Romney describes The Man from London as "a tour de force of camerawork, not only [...]

Fitna, the work of hate created by Dutch far-right-wing member of Parliament Geert Wilders, is now available online. (Don’t expect a link to it here.)
I managed to watch bits and pieces of it before fast-forwarding through repetitive hate-filled discourses by fanatical Muslim clerics interspersed with scenes depicting terrorist attacks committed by Muslim fanatics. By using [...]

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! fended off three new releases, hanging on to the top spot at this Easter weekend’s North American box office with US$24.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The 20th Century-Fox computer-animated comedy directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino — and featuring the voice of Jim Carrey as an [...]

2007 Ariel Awards - Mexican Academy Awards
2007 Ariel nominations: February 21, 2008
2007 Ariel winners: Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on March 25, 2008
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Writer-director Carlos Reygadas‘ drama Stellet licht / Luz silenciosa was the big winner at the 50th Ariel Awards, taking home statuettes for best film, [...]

In April, the Writers Guild Foundation will salute David Chase, creator of the The Sopranos, and Budd Schulberg, Academy Award and WGA Award winner for On the Waterfront, and the son of Paramount honcho B.P. Schulberg.
The On the Waterfront screening will also feature a q&a with Schulberg, who will turning 94 this Thursday, March 27.
What [...]

Careful (1992)
Direction: Guy Maddin. Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles; from a story by Toles. Cast: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Paul Cox, Brent Neale
 

In 1992, Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin and crew assembled for their third feature film — Careful, co-written by George Toles (and Maddin) and starring Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Paul [...]

Dennis Lee Cleven is currently doing research on Jean Harlow, the MGM star who died at the age of 26 in 1937. Harlow reportedly appeared in about a dozen movies before her big break in Howard Hughes‘ Hell’s Angels in 1929. Cleven is trying to find out the movie from which the above picture [...]

The documentary-focused Full Frame Film Festival, to be held in Durham, N.C., from April 3–6, has announced its 2008 film line-up.
Among the entries are James Marsh’s Man on Wire, about Frenchman Philippe Petite’s balancing act between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, and the winner of the World Cinema Jury Prize [...]

Sanshô Dayû / Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Direction: Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay: Fuji Yahiro; from the old legend and Ogai Mori’s 1915 short story “Sansho the Steward.” Cast: Shindô Eitarô, Kyoko Kagawa, Yoshiaki Hanayagi
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
One of the nostra about Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi is that he is ‘the most Japanese of all filmmakers.’ [...]

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil (1926)
 
Jack Neely’s "The Forgotten Director: Who was Clarence Brown?" at Metro Pulse:
"Dr. Gwenda Young, a film-studies professor at University College Cork, came across [Clarence] Brown by an unlikely route. Her Ph.D. thesis was about Jacques Tourneur, the French director of cult classics like Cat People [...]

Geoff Boucher’s "Remembering Bonnie and Clyde" in the Los Angeles Times:
"’I remember a creative impatience by almost everyone involved," [Warren] Beatty said, "and there was so much energy on the screen.’ The really interesting thing, though, was how audiences latched onto Bonnie and Clyde as a flexible symbol. Already feeling far removed from the Summer [...]

Tiburon (Calif.) International Film Festival - 2008 Golden Reel Awards
2008 Tiburon International Film Festival: March 13-21.
 

Set in the arid landscape of Algeria’s Aurès mountains, The Yellow House revolves around the plight of a couple whose son was recently killed in an ambush. The film’s director, Amor Hakkar, plays the bereaved father who does [...]

Nick Turse’s "The Golden Age of the Military-Entertainment Complex: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Pentagon-Style" at TomDispatch.com:
"So let’s play a new version of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, with the military standing in for Bacon. The object is to follow a few of the thousands of linkages and connections between Hollywood and the [...]

Directed by George Clooney — in what looks like quite a change of pace from Good Night, and Good Luck., the romantic comedy Leatherheads stars Clooney, Renée Zellweger, and John Krasinski as the three sides of a romantic triangle set in the world of 1920s football. Hm… but if it’s 1920s football, why is Zellweger [...]

Ed Park’s "Arthur C. Clarke’s down-to-earth legacy" in the Los Angeles Times:
". . . [Arthur C. Clarke] left explicit instructions that no religious ceremony accompany his death. (For good measure: In what was possibly his last interview, in BBC Focus magazine last December, he said the greatest danger humanity faced was ‘Organised religion polluting our [...]

Benedict Nightingale’s "Paul Scofield: an overlooked acting great" in The [London] Times:
"Why didn’t most theatregoers think of Paul Scofield in the way they thought of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson? After all, he had pretty well all the qualities, from Olivier’s danger through Gielgud’s grace to Richardson’s soul, that we admired in the 20th century’s most [...]

More than 40 programs will showcase new work from filmmakers, performers, and artists from 20 countries at the 46th Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF), which runs from March 25-30.
On the avant-garde front, the AAFF will present the U.S. premiere of Pip Chodorov’s Faux Mouvements (Wrong Moves) in the Cracking the Space/Time Continuum program "of [...]

The Dancing Pig, The Haunted Hotel (above and bottom, right), Ben-Hur, and The Teddy Bears will be among more than a dozen early short films screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Monday Nights with Oscar" presentation of "A Century Ago: The Films of 1907," on Monday, April 7, at the Academy [...]