LA Film Fest Reviews, Interviews & More
More or less at its halfway mark, the LA Film Festival continues without me, but before I left I caught Orly, one of those festival films common to the experience: small, with a potentially interesting conceptual slant, unlikely to get any sort of wide release and a film one is glad to have seen, but which one is unlikely to urge anyone else to seek out.
For those who caught the hugely entertaining Mirageman a couple of years ago, the appearance at this year's LA Film Festival of the same Chilean team's Mandrill was cause for excited expectation that was pretty much fulfilled.
As the earlier film was a loving, tongue-in-cheek homage to the '70s exploitation action film, so too is Mandrill, casting the...
Monsters, is a pleasant surprise from the LA Film Festival this year and reminder that quality doesn't always come with money. The film is reminiscent of many monster/horror films gone by, but brought together in an organic way that makes it an entirely new beast. The film truly abides by the indie spirit -- it cost what most studio films would spend on Starbucks in a...
One of the most intriguing titles in the Los Angeles Film Festival this year was The Life of Richard Wagner (1913), possibly the very first feature-length biopic, directed by Carl Froelich who'd go on to make the first German sound film Die Nacht gehört uns; produced by OskarMesster, a towering figure in production and innovation in early...
It's clear that the LA Film Festival is feeling the budget cuts. Aside from the lack of food and beverages at the venue, they moved the festivals from the clean streets of Westwood to Downtown LA, a notoriously conspicuous part of the city. For the most part the festival is rather safe, you park in one big structure and stay within the safe walls filled with mainly only filmmakers and the...
A real treat at this year's LA Film Festival was the screening of a restored print of Satyajit Ray's masterful Jalsaghar (The Music Room - 1958). It was presented in conjunction with the Academy who have undertaken the sterling work of restoring the entirety of Ray's oeuvre; they have made great strides since it was discovered when preparing the presentation...
One of the most intriguing - and strangely unheralded - events at this year's LA Film Festival was the North American premiere of South Korean film critic Jung Sung-il's staggering debut, Café Noir. It's staggering in part because it runs over three hours, is filled with long takes and defiantly devoid of action, yet thought-out to the minutest...
The LA Film Festival's splendid Leopoldo Torres Nilsson retrospective continues with what is sometimes referred to as his masterpiece, La Mano en La Trampa (The Hand in the Trap), winner of the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1961. Continuing the close collaboration with his novelist/screenwriter wife Beatriz Guido, it's a sexual horror...
The fact that Argentinian director Leopoldo Torres Nilsson is barely spoken of these days is cause for outcry. Happily, the LA Film Festival has programmed a mini retrospective of four of his 30-plus features from the fifties to the mid-seventies. In his day, his was a name was one to watch at the European film festivals, a world cinema auteur ranked with Welles, Bergman, and...
The 16th Los Angeles Film Festival kicked off on Thursday with Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are Alright. But I forbore from braving the downtown Lakers insanity by starting on Friday with the Danish prison movie R. And this is what it's like:
The second film in the LA Film Festival's mini retrospective of Argentinian Leopoldo Torres Nilsson was 1959's La Caída (The Fall). A once-highly respected director, his profile has plummeted since his heyday of the late '50s and early '60s, and his presence at the festival is a valuable opportunity for at least a partial return to the pantheon.
The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival opens this Thursday in its new downtown location. I can’t say I am especially pleased at its moving from the comfortable leafy environs of Westwood to the soulless consumer-trap island of the LA Live complex, but then again I hardly one to stand against urban regeneration and the festival has picked up a raft of eager new local sponsors, so...
Last week at the LA Film Festival, writer/director Sophie Barthes premiered her third film Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti (check out the trailer and poster). After the screening, both of them got up to talk about making a comedy about a world where soul-removal is the new Xanax.
In a world were consumers can have anything they want people choose to go soulless...
The LA Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday night with the closing gala of Ponyo, Miyazaki Hayao's latest. Not being a great fan of animation, Miyazaki, or twee children's dross I gave it a miss, although I may just be a curmudgeonly old cinephile with no soul. But if I'd seen that I'd have missed the sole screening of United Red Army, which was...
Ready to laugh your ass off and cry your eyes out? Probably one of the most honest, heartfelt, and feel good movies of the LA Film Festival is After the Storm directed by Hilla Medalia.
The film follows a group of legendary New York Broadway actors Gerry McIntyre, James Lecesne, Randy Redd, who were inspired to help the youth of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina....
Definitely one of the best films at The LA Film Festival was Branson. When you think of some of the great places to see a live show, where do you think of? Broadway? Hollywood? Vegas? I bet Branson, Missouri isn't the first thing that pops into your head, but it is quickly becoming THE place for singers, dancers, and performers to strut their stuff on...
Wakamatsu Kôji's United Red Army - the Path to Asama Mountain Lodge was the the final installment of the "films that got away" at this year's LA Film Festival. Its Japanese premiere was in Yufuin back in 2007 and it has since played to great acclaim in Berlin, London and Turin, finally making its way to the US last night.
The film divides...
In association with the estimable Film Foundation, the LA Film Festival presents a spanking new restored print of LA favourite Curtis Harrington's debut feature, Night Tide (1961). It kicks off like a seaside noir, with sailor Dennis Hopper tooling around the night-time Venice promenade before wandering into the scene at a basement jazz club. Amidst the hipsters and...
The retrospective strand of this year's LA Film Festival focuses on hot rod movies, one each from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I caught cult favourite Hot Rods From Hell (1967), a fairly standard representation of the genre, with cross-generational conflict - "these kids have nowhere to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour" - and bargain basement...
One of the films I was most keen to catch at this year's LA Film Festival was the Portuguese hit of the European circuit, Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. I nearly didn't make it for, in an incomprehensibly idiotic bit of programming, there was less than twenty minutes to get from The Silence Before Bach in Westwood to the Landmark on Pico; it...
