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

By Robert Koehler
Barely a month after the Society of French Directors (SRF), which runs Cannes’ Directors Fortnight (aka Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), unceremoniously dropped Frederic Boyer as artistic director, film critic and festival director Edoard Waintrop has been named to replace Boyer. A fixture in the French cinema culture as longtime critic for Liberation (and currently [...]

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Drive and The Tiniest Place
By Robert Koehler
A running conversation at film festivals in the US and abroad (mostly abroad): The urgency of film criticism to advocate for certain cinema, and ignore the other cinemas. The best reason? Life is too short to deal very much or very long with crap, and is much better spent [...]

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By Robert Koehler
The Society of French Directors (SRF), which governs the Quinzaine des Realisiteurs, or Directors Fortnight, has dismissed Quinzaine director Frederic Boyer after his second and stormy year. The 2011 edition was roundly criticized and even lambasted (see Jacques Telemacque’s widely discussed Le Monde attack that ran during the festival), and suffered particularly in [...]

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By Robert Koehler
You would have to go back to either 1999–when the Dardennes won for Rosetta–or 1997–when Abbas Kiarostami won for Taste of Cherry in a tie with Imamura Shohei for The Eel and when Tim Burton was a member of the jury–to find a Palme d’Or winner quite as satisfying and unconventional as tonight’s [...]

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By Robert Koehler
Less than an hour before the announcement of the Palme and other prizes, rumors are swirling over possible winners based on sightings of who’s in Cannes….and who’s not.
In the latter category, count Mike Leigh, which makes Another Year unlikely to win any prizes. Based on who has returned or stayed in Cannes, look [...]

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“Where’s the significant fine art?” Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lakeside Landscape (1889) and Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936), courtesy of the excellent Landscape Suicide.
After several months in which the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was presumably doing good on its promise to re-prioritize and promote its threatened film program, my Save Film [...]

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Word is quickly spreading that the man whom many regard as the world’s greatest living animator–Yuri Norstein–is making a brief US tour, with visits to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Olympia. My 23-month-old daughter routinely requests viewings of Hedgehog in the Fog, but I’ve been an admirer of Norstein’s work [...]

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The Wall Street Journal published an article this weekend–“LACMA and the Cinéastes”–that provides a good account of the efforts of my colleagues and I during our previous five-week campaign to convince the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to reverse its decision to end its 41-year-old film program this October. At the moment, films [...]

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The campaign to restore classic and international cinema programming at LACMA continues. Some readers may have heard about the $150,000 donation accepted last week in the wake of our Save Film at LACMA protest. But as reported in yesterday’s New York Times, big questions remain regarding the content of the program. Will it [...]

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The Los Angeles Times is reporting that “In the wake of the chorus of disapproval that greeted last week’s announcement that he was red-lighting the 40-year-old weekend film series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, museum Director Michael Govan has some good news: Potential donors have stepped up, interested in helping underwrite the [...]

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