Robert Feinberg and Ruby Lynn Reyner are finally Finishing Heaven
I spent most of Sunday decompressing so my Saturday report is a day late. It all fits into the big picture though because the first film I watched was a documentary that tests the notion of whether late is indeed better than never. Let’s just pretend I’m [...]

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The Los Angeles Film Festival Audience Awards were handed out last night.
Audiences chose The Wackness as Best Narrative Feature, Anvil! The Story of Anvil as Best Documentary Feature and Man on Wire as Best International Feature.
I didn’t catch the Anvil documentary because it played too far away from Westwood, but Man on Wire was the [...]

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The 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival wraps up today with Family Day, the premiere of Journey to the Center of the Earth, a scattering of other screenings and the announcement of the Audience Awards, but for me it ended last night.
Before I post the usual recount of yesterday’s movie activity, I wanted to report the [...]

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Baghead: Be afraid. Be very afraid. 
I took some time out to catch a few new theatrical releases on Friday night so there’s only one movie from LAFF to report on.
How do you describe Mark and Jay (The Puffy Chair) Duplass’ Baghead. Is it a horror movie? Is it a comedy? Is it another entry in [...]

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Roy Andersson’s You, the Living (Du Levande) 
Have you ever known someone you feel sorry for but can’t bear to spend more than a few minutes with? That describes the main character Eléonore (Eléonore Hendricks) in Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a film I saw just before the festival began but am only now [...]

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Wednesday was a day at LAFF that probably would’ve been more rewarding earlier in the festival when my energy was higher. As it is, we’ve passed the half way mark, there’s a feeling of winding down and I’m finding myself losing patience with some of the more challenging fare. Nevertheless, I came away with some [...]

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A scene from Robert McGuire’s segment of Fear(s) of the Dark
I very nearly skipped The Wackness last night for the late addition of Winged Creatures with Kate Beckinsale. Something about The Wackness didn’t feel right. More than the mixed reviews out of Sundance, I hated the title and the prospect of another story about a [...]

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Choke: Two sex addicts walk into a strip club…
I might be stating the obvious here, but something has come into clearer focus for me these past few days: Beware of reviews from film festivals. They’re not to be trusted. Environment, expectations and state of mind are all mutable, they all have an impact on a [...]

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Sunday was another good day at LAFF. I saw three documentaries and one narrative feature and they all ranged from good to great.
First up was Man on Wire, a superb and surprisingly moving documentary about Philippe Petit, a Frenchman, acrobat and mad dreamer who walked a tight-rope between the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade [...]

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On the surface, the most obvious choice for the third day of the Los Angeles Film Festival would’ve been Werner Herzog’s man vs. nature in Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. Besides playing at the Majestic Crest, the coolest venue in the LAFF circuit, I’ve also been looking forward to seeing it [...]

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After a month of having my face pressed against the candy store window, gazing longingly at all the mysterious and exotic treats in their brightly colored wrappers, I finally got my golden ticket, the doors of the Los Angeles Film Festival chocolate factory swung wide and, like Augustus Gloop, I made a bee line for [...]

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The 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival kicked off last night in Westwood with the World Premiere of Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman. The adrenalized action film based on Mark Millar’s comic seems a strange choice for a film festival ostensibly focused on independent and foreign cinema, but it fits [...]

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Family Day: Westwood Village of the Damned? 
Though the closing night film, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, screens on Saturday June 28 after the narrative and documentary competition awards are handed out, the Los Angeles Film Festival technically continues on Sunday the 29th with Family Day.
The daylong event includes all manner of free outdoor activities for [...]

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LiC will never be mistaken for a Hollywood business blog (thank the gods), but the real business of film festivals like Cannes is…well…business. If a film doesn’t get bought, it doesn’t get seen.
Though the market this year was repeatedly described as tepid, particularly for domestic US distributors, several potential gems were picked up during the [...]

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It screened yesterday after most buyers and many journalists had already gone home, but Laurent Cantet’s Parisian classroom drama Entre Les Murs (The Class) took the top prize Sunday night at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. It’s the first French film to win the Palme d’Or since Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan (Under [...]

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Askat Kuchinchirekov in Sergei Dvortsevoi’s Tulpan
Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoi’s drama Tulpan was awarded the Un Certain Regard Prize on Saturday night while the Hope Prize went to Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog, the KnockOut Prize went to James Toback’s documentary Tyson, Cloud 9 by Andreas Dresen won the One-From-The-Heart Award and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata [...]

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Cannes is winding down and many journalists have already bolted from what is being called a lackluster festival in some quarters. I couldn’t let a whole day go by with a single two-sentence post, so here’s a collection of Cannes odds and ends I’ve overlooked in the past few days. All of these films played [...]

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I found out more than I wanted to about Che, so with the Charlie Kaufman film I’m only posting one link. Here’s Todd McCarthy’s Variety review.

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Campino and Wim Wenders - star and director of Palermo Shooting (Getty Images)
Palermo Shooting, the latest film from LiC favorite Wim Wenders, is scheduled to be unveiled in competition at Cannes on Saturday, but according to a Reuters interview from Scott Roxborough, Wenders was still working on mixing the film when the festival began and the [...]

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Jeff Wells appears to have gotten the Lawrence of Latin America he was hoping for. Here he is on Soderbergh’s Che and Guerilla. I didn’t read what he said, but the headlines sum it up.
[Updated 3:40pm PST] Variety’s Anne Thompson…not so much.
[4:20pm PST] Austin360’s Charles Ealy describes the scene more than the movies themselves.
[5:00pm PST] Variety’s [...]

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When Clint Eastwood’s Changeling was first announced, people wondered if it had anything to do with the 1980 George C. Scott movie The Changeling. It did not, but many sources continued referring to the Eastwood film with ‘The’ in the title.
The French, speaking French as people who live in France are inclined to do, called [...]

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In Competition: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna 
Here are a few more nuggets to come out of the ongoing Cannes Film Festival
Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence). Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium’s two-time Palme d’Or winning brother/director team, return to Cannes with another tale of the urban poor. This time, an Albanian woman [...]

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Much of the buzz out of Cannes this weekend surrounds the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I’m as excited about Indy as the next guy…well not as excited as the people who pored over the titles of the songs on the official soundtrack hoping to dig up plot spoilers, [...]

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Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and
Woody Allen on the set of Vicky Cristina Barcelona
As promised, here are a few more reviews from the third day (yesterday) of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
First off, Anne Thompson talked to Michael Moore about his sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11.
Also, since I posted the first summary yesterday, several readers [...]

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Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve in
Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale)
Cannes seems to have begun rolling in earnest and reviews are pouring in. Time is short at the moment so here is a look at some of the biggies. Stay tuned for an addendum later tonight or tomorrow. 
Screening in Un Certain Regard is [...]

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Check this out Scully, it’s called Living in Cinema. Best. Website. Ever. 
Dig out your Lone Gunmen t-shirts and get the nerd stains cleaned off of them. Organizers of the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 19 - 29) have added a sneak peek at the upcoming X-Files: I Want to Believe. 
Star David Duchovny, writer/director Chris Carter and screenwriter [...]

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Cannes 2008 in Competition: Waltz with Bashir 
Screening in competition, Waltz with Bashir is the fourth feature from Israeli director Ari Folman. Because it’s animated and it centers on the Middle East, it is drawing comparisons to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, but it sounds like a very different animal. It tells the story of the massacre of [...]

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Perhaps you’ve heard - there’s a little thing called the Cannes Film Festival happening on the Côte d’Azur right now and, now that the complaining about flights, accommodations, prices, and the color of the press passes has been dispensed with, reports from this morning’s press screening of Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness are streaming in.
Being the most [...]

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Variety reported this afternoon that Russian director Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie is opening the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival while Guillermo del Toro’s sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army will be closing it. 
Sandwiched in the middle with 230 films, shorts and music videos will be Sacha Gervasi’s documentary Anvil! The True Story [...]

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The Los Angeles Film Festival announces its full lineup on Wednesday morning including the opening and closing night films. Last year the festival opened with the world premiere of Kasi Lemmons’ Talk to Me starring Don Cheadle and closed with the North American premiere of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
If the festival organizers stick to last year’s pattern, they’ll follow [...]

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