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Any suspicion that this competition bears likeness to festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, etc.) is erroneous . . . Of its 27 awards, 26 are reserved for English language (understand that this means American, with a few notable exceptions, like Hamlet from Great Britain in 1948) cinema. Festivals are fundamentally international and include exhibition before juries, journalists, and artistic and technical delegations from all the films in competition in two or three weeks, with gatherings of theorists and critics, producers and directors, abundant press conferences, receptions, and parallel cultural events....

Western, which earned a Special Jury Prize for verité filmmaking at Sundance, is rich in archetypes from fiction about the West. Two aging, chivalrous mayors, Chad Foster and José Manuel Maldonado, strive to preserve harmony and a bygone way of life, personified by rugged cattle ranchers like Martín Wall. But modernity encroaches on their turf, as a drug cartel destabilizes the region, leading to a ban on livestock trade. Suddenly Wall, an adoring father to 6-year-old Brylyn, is without means of support....

Award-winners Vitalina Varela and Pedro Costa at the Locarno Film Festival (Photo: Marco Abram) 1) The Locarno Film Festival wrapped up this weekend, with Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa winning the festival’s Golden Leopard for his latest feature Vitalina Varela. Awarded by an international jury headed by French filmmaker and novelist Catherine Breillat, honors also went to Height of the Wave (from South Korean director Park Jung-bum), which took home the Special Jury Prize, and Damien Manivel, who won the Leopard for Best Direction on his French/South Korean co-production, Les Enfants d’Isadora....

Michael Snow and Aimée Mitchell For more than 50 years, Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow has almost single-handedly redefined how cinema can move with such vision-bending masterworks as Wavelength (1967), La Région Centrale (1971), and *Corpus Callosum (2002). Now Snow has just finished production on his latest film, Cityscape, which was shot in IMAX from Toronto’s Centre Island and will be edited in the coming months. It is set to debut in September 2019 as part of the XL Outer Worlds festival, screening at Toronto’s Cinesphere....

Meeting Paul Haggis on a crisp fall day in the lobby bar of the Mercer Hotel isn’t, I remind him, the first time the Oscar-winning filmmaker and I have crossed paths. That was four years ago, at a dinner party in Los Angeles, where Haggis arrived in the company of Oliver Stone and I spent most of the night thinking what a nice guy Haggis was not to confront me about my recent comments in Slate, where I had written of his eventual 2004 Best Picture winner, Crash: That article was quickly rebutted by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, under the headline “In defense of the year’s ‘worst movie,’” before I penned a final riposte of my own in the pages of the LA Weekly—collectively, it would seem, a lot of critical hot air, since Haggis claims never to have read a word of it....

Branded to Kill When the first retrospective devoted to enfant terrible filmmaker Seijun Suzuki hit North American shores in the early Nineties, his name was virtually unknown outside of Japan, unless you’d caught his languid, period-set, doomed-romance-cum-art-house-ghost-story Zigeunerweisen at the Berlin Film Festival in 1981, where it was recognized with an Honorable Mention. A couple of his films had been made available on home video in the U.S. via a specialty label curated by John Zorn, but only at Kim’s Video, and only if you didn’t mind watching them without English subtitles....

Black Snake Moan is the heartwarming tale of how a white-trash crack whore confronts her demons with the help of a backwoods negro who chains her to his radiator. I intend neither sarcasm nor racism—and neither does Craig Brewer, who follows his affable if overrated Hustle & Flow with a hardcore exploitation flick that also happens to be the most impassioned spiritual parable in recent memory. The guy could’ve done anything; like most H&F skeptics, I figured he’d hustle his way into some big, dumb studio picture....

The members of the Academy who gave Departures its Oscar must be feeling their mortality. The movie tells the story of a second-rate cellist who loses his job when an orchestra is disbanded but finds inner peace and fulfillment working as a nokanshi, ceremonially preparing the bodies of the newly deceased before they are placed in coffins for cremation. Maybe the Academy’s elderly voters appreciated the way that the man’s newfound serenity guides him to an emotional rapprochement with his hated father, who abandoned him with the gift of a pebble when he was a small child....

The story of young lovers at once geographically separated and technologically connected, Drake Doremus’s romantic drama arrives decked out in indie-buzz trappings, including a beguiling turn by up-and-coming it-girl Felicity Jones and a couple of Sundance awards in tow (including the 2011 Grand Jury Prize). Regardless of whether these descriptors have you wide-eyed in anticipation or fleeing for the art-house hills, it’s worth stating up front that Like Crazy is nothing if not a movie with its heart in the right place....

From a monster to monstrous love: Bong Joon-ho’s followup to The Host (06) is a disquieting mother-son story starring veteran actress Kim Hye-ja as the film’s shrewd, obsessed—and unnamed—title character: a single parent, small-town apothecary, and black-market acupuncturist. Playing her slow-witted 27-year-old son, Do-joon, Won Bin pads around like an overgrown puppy, completely dependent on his mother. Though Do-joon seems too hapless to be dangerous, the indolent local police pin a teenage schoolgirl’s murder on him....

The historical setting of The Last Christeros is revealed in an audio-only opening over a black screen: a man being interviewed recounts the nailing of a notice to a church door detailing the ban on religious worship by Mexico’s post-revolution government. From there, Matías Meyer’s landscape portrait follows a group of Catholics as they maintain rebellious solidarity against government forces sometime during the 1930s. Between cosmic indifference and the ever-watchful vultures overhead, these carbine-toting men of God have it tough....

When compiling the in-production news items for each edition of this magazine there are times when the Plausibility Alarm goes off. Last year, we reported that Saoirse Ronan was scheduled to play a “lean, mean, killing machine,” and then we thought, wait a minute, that wisp of a girl from The Lovely Bones . . . seriously? Seriously. Reunited with her Atonement director, Ronan is Hanna. The daughter of a renegade CIA operative (a very grim Eric Bana), she has been raised and trained by Daddy to kill—and disembowel....

Who could have foreseen that Angelina Jolie, once American cinema’s most radioactive element, would prove as respectable and traditional a helmer as ever safely brought in an epic? Her sophomore feature adapts Lauren Hillenbrand’s account of Louis Zamperini (played in the film by Jack O’Connell), an Olympic runner turned U.S. Air Force bombardier who survived 47 days at sea after crash-landing in the Pacific, followed by nearly three years in Japanese POW camps....

Short of the Week aims to close the gap between artist and viewer by spotlighting the work of emerging talent every week. Since shorts are a tried-and-true pathway to feature filmmaking and financing, the exposure and resources that Short of the Week offers help to ensure that neophytes have just as much (or greater) opportunity to showcase and workshop their films as their predecessors. The site offers detailed how-to articles on navigating festivals and interviews with fellow shorts directors, one-on-one feedback (included in the $29 submission fee), and a permanent home for the films....

A few weeks before Kino Lorber’s April 25 Blu-ray release of Josef von Sternberg’s Anatahan (aka The Saga of Anatahan), an online writer mused that he didn’t know anybody who had seen the movie. As a matter of fact, it only received what seems to have been a token theatrical release in 1954, and later, in 1977, Twyman Films, a Dayton, Ohio, rental outfit, distributed the film in 16mm. Unfortunately, the bookings did not flood in....