f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

“When I studied, I met a filmmaker who decided for me, in a way , what I was going to become. It was Armand Gatti who brought us together.” –Jean-Pierre Dardenne at his 2009 Cannes masterclass
“Film is a system that allows Godard to be a novelist, Gatti to make theater, and me to [...]

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The Los Angeles Film Festival announced its line-up today, and any fears that its new director might steer the festival–with its solid line-up several years running–in an untoward direction have been put to rest. Some of the highlights follow.
The latest edition of the always excellent “The Films That Got Away” series programmed by the [...]

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Drag Me to Hell (left); Enter the Void (top right); Thirst (bottom right)
By Robert Koehler
Lost amid the general, conventional sense of the Cannes competition lineup (see here) as a colloquium of auteurs–from Haneke to Campion, Audiard to Tsai, To to Resnais–is the fact that, for better or worse, the Palais will be the site of [...]

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Robert Koehler has been a longtime supporter of–and occasional contributor to–Film Journey, and I have written many times of my respect and admiration for Rose Kuo, who has transformed AFI FEST in Los Angeles the past couple of years into a major festival for world cinema, so I’m delighted to quote Variety’s announcement yesterday:

“Robert Koehler, [...]

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I understand that the rainy season in Los Angeles extends through March, and that temperatures quickly rise after June Gloom burns off, but as a devotee of the many smaller ethnic/national film festivals in the city, I’m distressed that so many of them have chosen April as their play date. Los Angeles famously could [...]

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The Golden Age Continued: The Films That Matter in 2008
By ROBERT KOEHLER
It’s always dangerous to assume anything, but I figured that by now I would have been teased—somewhere, by someone—for having argued more than once over the past couple of years that we are living in a new golden age of film. This position runs [...]

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Birdsong
This past year was a difficult one for me, schedule-wise, but I still managed to squeeze in a good number of films at the Palm Springs, COLCOA, Los Angeles, DocuWeek, and AFI festivals, UCLA, the American Cinematheques, AMPAS, Cinefamily, LACMA (check out Bernardo Rondeau’s top ten list here), REDCAT, and the Filmforum, not to mention [...]

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I don’t know how I missed this until now, but the wonderful Cinefamily revival group–presenting “interesting and unusual programs of exceptional, distinctive, weird and wonderful films” at the Silent Movie Theatre in Hollywood–commissioned famed comic artist Chris Ware to illustrate the cover of their current Nov/Dec calendar, a beautiful tribute to Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story [...]

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It’s not often that you can get t-shirts designed by major figures of world cinema, and even less often for a better cause: Chris Marker invokes his trademark character, Guillaume-en-egypte, for Barack Obama at Wexner Center for the Arts.

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Count me impressed. I was just scanning the PDF of the Nuart Theatre’s fall/winter Movie Guide and was amazed to see the announcement of new 35mm prints of Charlie Chaplin’s phenomenal Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and François Truffaut’s The Wild Child (1970). Looking closer, I discovered that both are being distributed by a new company [...]

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