New York Film Festival and More

This year's New York Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, opening with a screening of Roman Polanski's Carnage. While the latest offering from the Chinatown director is not among those films I covered in my first set of reviews, several of the fest's finest entries are, most notably Béla Tarr's latest masterpiece, The Turin Horse. Also, as usual, I wrote the introduction for Slant Magazine's comprehensive coverage of the event.

New York Film Festival
Introduction (Slant)
The Turin Horse (Slant)
The Loneliest Planet (Slant)
Le Havre (The L Magazine)

New Releases
Benda Bilili! (Slant)
Surrogate Valentine (Slant)

Busy-with-New-York-Film-Festival Linkthrough

As I've been attending as many press screenings as possible for the upcoming New York Film Festival, I will have to keep this introduction short. So let's just get to the goods (by which I mean the links.) Look for NYFF coverage soon.

First Run Films:
Toast (Slant)
White Wash (Slant)
A Bird of the Air (Slant)
There Was Once... (Slant)
Journey from Zanskar (Village Voice)

DVDs:
Les Cousins (Slant)

All in a Week's Work

Five new film reviews this week, though, despite the occasional pleasures offered up by a few of the movies (most notably, Tom Tykwer's 3), none is really worth seeking out. Twas ever thus...

In other, non-film related, doings, I contributed my first ever music piece, a review of the Mekons' solid new offering.

Film
3 (Slant)
Berlin 36 (Slant)
Prince of Swine (Slant)
Jane's Journey (Time Out New York)
One Fall (Time Out New York)

Music
The Mekons: Ancient and Modern (Slant)

It's Martial Arts Mania!

Or so it would seem from my selection of reviews this week which includes two titles featuring Chinese-style hand-to-hand combat. While Shaolin's monks practice something called "martial Zen", the stars of My Kingdom are "opera warriors" fighting onstage amidst ornate costumes and makeup, making the latter film the (marginally) more appealing of the two.

Shaolin (Slant)
My Kingdom (Slant)
Tanner Hall (Slant)
Inside Out (Time Out New York)

Cineaste and More

The new issue of Cineaste is ready to hit stands and included among its pages is my take on the very good, though necessarily problematic, documentary The Interrupters. (The piece is not available online.) My other reviews for the week, linked below, are of lesser degrees of interest.

Love Crime (Slant)
Buttons (Village Voice)
Rebirth (Time Out New York)
Seven Days in Utopia (Time Out New York)

An Idiotic Week...

...isn't such a bad thing when the idiot in question is Paul Rudd's character in the new Jesse Peretz film entitled, appropriately enough, Our Idiot Brother. Idiotic in its typical, less positive connotations may not quite describe the rest of the movies I reviewed this week, but it's safe to say that none provide anything close to the pleasure of the Peretz.

Our Idiot Brother (Slant)
Tales from the Golden Age (Slant)
Chasing Madoff (Village Voice)
The Family Tree (Time Out New York)

Help, It's Milton Moses Ginsberg

My latest batch of reviews covers not only the dreadful feel-good racial quagmire The Help, but a piece on two intriguing films (screening next week at BAM) by cult director Milton Moses Ginsberg as well as a pair of not entirely unsuccessful new releases.

Sex Games, Werewolves and Nixon: Two by Milton Moses Ginsberg (The L Magazine)
The Help (Slant)
One Day (Slant)
Mozart's Sister (Slant)