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

My favorite animated feature last year, the undistributed Sita Sings the Blues, created almost entirely in Flash by Nina Paley, has become Thirteen.org’s first feature to be streamed in its entirety on their website. The film has been idling in legal limbo for many months because of its use of 80-year-old pop songs Paley [...]

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I’m still trying to post some reviews from AFI FEST, but my baby has been in the hospital for “minor” surgery this week and everything else has been put to the side.
In the meantime, I was able to attend a few Festival screenings with the LACMA film program coordinator Bernardo Rondeau, which became a highlights [...]

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The Class
In case you missed some of the higher profile films at AFI FEST this week, here’s a list of some of the films that will have upcoming screenings or distribution in Los Angeles:
• Slumdog Millionaire (LACMA preview on 11/11; Landmark release on 11/12; Laemmle release on 12/21)
• Gomorrah (American Cinematheque screening on 11/11; Laemmle release on [...]

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Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999)
I’m wondering if anyone has any superior horror films or recent discoveries they’d recommend?
I still think Romero’s last zombie movie, Diary of the Dead, is a fantastic genre piece with impressive stylistic qualities (first person camerawork, documentary footage of Katrina) and incisive social commentary, as is typical for the series.
Last year, [...]

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Last night at the REDCAT, Thai filmmaker (and graduate of Chicago’s School of the Art Institute) Apichatpong Weerasethakul opened his first solo exhibition in the US, entitled Unknown Forces (2007). A filmmaker who often blends narrative and experimental techniques (particularly structural innovation) in his feature films, I learned he also produces and distributes avant [...]

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British filmmaker Peter Watkins’ nearly six-hour film, La Commune (Paris, 1871), made in the year 2000, is without a doubt one of the best and most important films of the decade, and it was just released this week on DVD by First Run Features. Count yourselves lucky–the film, which commemorates the short-lived working class [...]

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So the Toronto International Film Festival announced its line-up of films today, and those of us who will be attending can hardly contain our excitement. Of course, Girish and I have already started complaining that the new films by, say, Denis, Bujalski, Aoyama, Tian, Allen, and Hong weren’t included. (Time to order that [...]

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I’ve taken a longer blogging break than I anticipated, partly because I was out of town and partly because I was immersed in finishing my liner notes for two upcoming Masters of Cinema DVDs in the UK, Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). (Strictly Film School’s Acquarello contributed the essay for our [...]

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I Walked with a Zombie
Great DVD news has arrived this week for fans of elegant horror: Universal have announced a Bela Lugosi collection for September that will finally offer Edgar G. Ulmer’s expressionist/art deco masterpiece, The Black Cat (1934), and Warner have solidified an October street date for their long-awaited Val Lewton collection. The [...]

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For the last few years, Apollo Cinema have theatrically distributed mini-festivals of the Oscar nominees for Best Live Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film, and this weekend the American Cinematheque screened the 2005 touring program. For some reason, this collection doesn’t include the nominated films by Bill Plympton (Guard Dog), Mike Gabriel [...]

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