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world cinema in Los Angeles and beyond

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Entries from July 2009

LACMA jettisons film program

July 30th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · 8 Comments

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art–the largest art museum in the western United States–announced yesterday that it will be shutting down its roughly 40-year-old film program this fall. Along with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the much more eclectic Cinefamily and REDCAT theaters, LACMA is one of the few venues in [...]

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Categories: Commentary

Good news and bad news

July 30th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments

The good news is that blogger extraordinaire David Hudson has returned, and to the home of one of the best websites for world cinema, no less:
The Auteurs Daily
The bad news . . . upcoming in the next post (although if you’re a cinephile living in Los Angeles, you already know).

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Categories: Commentary

LAFF Capsules

July 28th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments

Here are short responses to three of the films I saw at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. I’ll be posting longer reviews of more films later this week. -Doug

A Week Alone (Celina Murga, Argentina)
Murga’s debut 2002 feature, Ana and the Others (miraculously available on DVD and Netflix instant play) is one of the [...]

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Categories: Uncategorized

Eisenstein and Ivan the Terrible

July 25th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments

A couple of weeks ago, LACMA screened new prints of Sergei Eisenstein’s last film, Ivan the Terrible, parts I and II.  I hadn’t seen it in years, so it was a special delight to view its baroque excess on the big screen.  The film has been criticized for its pictorial bombast and lack of the [...]

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Categories: Film review

The Exiles DVD

July 23rd, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments

For the past three years, Milestone Video has been producing an amazing DVD package for their two-disc fall release of Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles. For Angelenos especially, the release offers a bounty of fascinating extras:
Disc One:
• The Exiles, Feature. 72:46
• The 2008 Theatrical Trailer. 2:16
• Bunker Hill 1956. Courtesy of USC Moving Image Archive. 17:25
• Los Angeles [...]

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Categories: Commentary

New Tarkovsky Documentaries

July 7th, 2009 by Doug Cummings · No Comments

Andrei Tarkovsky has achieved an unusually devoted following (even among film cultists) enticed by his public persona, which championed aesthetic perfection as a kind of mystical calling.  It’s easy to reach into introspection when parsing his films, as two new documentaries demonstrate by adopting personal lenses to frame the way the filmmaker shaped his work [...]

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Categories: Film review