Do not confuse the Los Angeles Film Festival with the plethora of other film festivals in the city. I would list them all for reference but I have better things to do with my time. The “LA Film Fest” wrapped up this past weekend (June 16-26) and it was my first time in attendance.

In a city like LA, with the abundance of film festivals and savvy audiences made up of filmmakers, festivals tend to go one of two ways; they are either populated by pretentious Hollywood douchebags, or they are struggling to survive selling tickets only to the families of the filmmakers. I shamefully admit I expected the first of the two options, but The LA Film Festival was neither pretentious nor struggling.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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 hugely-appealing Marko Zaror this time as an eponymous Bondian hitman, inspired equally by fictitious movie super-agent John Colt (with highly amusing and spot-on film clips) as by the childhood murder of his parents. Unfortunately for him, the daughter of his long-sought target is a beautiful and feisty young woman who provides him first with the challenge of seduction and subsequently that of staying alive.

Continue Reading

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 German cinema who built the country’s first studio; and starring Guiseppe Becce, who became one of the first (and most prolific) composers working specifically for film (Caligari, Der müde Tod, Der letzte Mann).

Continue Reading

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 for his honourary Oscar in 1993 that what few prints of his films could be found were in a deplorable state, with many elements missing or irreparable.

Continue Reading

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 degree. There were plenty of walkouts but even in the emptiest-seeming shots, there’s something that nags at the interest, a suspicion that Jung will come up with something really arresting. That happens, as it turns out, in the quietest moments, and perseverance and attention are rewarded by a rich and deceptively detailed tapestry of a film…

Continue Reading

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 story that centers on a convent school girl home for the holidays. She becomes fascinated by her reputedly freakish half-brother who’s kept locked upstairs. But it turns out to be something altogether different…

Continue Reading

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 Buñuel. The first of Nilsson’s films I’ve been able to see, La casa del angel (House of the Angel, 1957) is remarkably worthy of the comparison…

Continue Reading

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:

Continue Reading