f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

Yesterday, I attended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ preview of the world re-premiere of John Ford’s Upstream (1927), which screens for the public tonight. “Re-premiere” because the film was long believed to have been lost before it was rediscovered last year in the New Zealand Film Archive; the film is part [...]

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By Robert Koehler
Following the New Media Film Festival screening last night at Downtown Independent in downtown Los Angeles, festival programming director Noel Lawrence (center) moderates a very new media panel discussion on Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating film on Hitchcock, doubling, paranoia, the Cold War and catastrophe culture, Double Take. In the foreground to the right is [...]

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LACMA is halfway through its series devoted to cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, one of RKO’s prime cameramen in the 1940s and ’50s, and thus one of the key strategists behind the shadowy “noir” look in films such as Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Clash by Night (1952). [...]

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By Robert Koehler
Jean-Luc Godard (and his Les Inrocks interview) marked the starting point for this year’s Cannes blogging, partly because I anticipated that his Film Socialisme would certainly be one of the major films at the festival. It is that, and more, since the film’s impact will long outlast the mere week and a half [...]

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The Southeast European Film Festival concludes tonight at UCLA. A highlight has been the US premiere of Goran Devic’s and Zvonimir Juric’s The Blacks, a trancelike, psychological thriller about a group of Croatian special forces during the Bosnian war. It’s being touted as the first Croat feature to address Croatian war crimes, but [...]

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45-year-old Jo Van Fleet as octogenarian Ella Garth in Wild River.
The three-and-a-half-day TCM Classic Film Festival wraps up today with the North American premiere of the newly restored Metropolis (1927) tonight. The Festival has been somewhat of an experiment in its first year, screening good prints of well known films in the heart of [...]

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The 2010 Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles debuted last night and will continue through Sunday, April 25th. It’s one of the better produced local festivals and takes place in Hollywood at the posh Arclight Cinema. It aims to strengthen ties between filmmakers of Indian descent, audiences, and industry people, so its line-up [...]

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10-17-88 (1989)
I’ve got an article in this week’s LA Weekly about the films of Ross Lipman, whom many readers will recognize as the UCLA restorationist behind classic films by independent luminaries such as Kenneth Anger, John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Charles Burnett. However, his upcoming show at REDCAT on March 30 (a Tuesday event [...]

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Nicolas Pereda’s Perpetuum Mobile
By Robert Koehler
The juries have spoken, and—what else is new with festival juries?–I’m trying to wrap my head around some of the results. First, a big day for directors Maria Novaro for The Good Herbs and Nicolas Pereda for Perpetuum Mobile. The Mexican results went almost exactly as I predicted: Perpetuum Mobile [...]

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By Robert Koehler
From the traces of suicidal young in Listorti’s debut to the presence of suicidal young who won’t go away in Esmir Filho’s The Famous and the Dead/Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte (another debut, in the Ibero American competition)—death is in the air in Guadalajara. Slippery as a fish and defying any [...]

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