Monday, July 23-------You may think you know the film that many major film critics chose as the best of last year. But in reality, with little fanfare or certainly Oscar buzz, the film that garnered the most uniform praise from top film scribes was a French thriller, shot in 1959 and set in occupied France during World War II by a director who has been six feet under for more than three decades. That film, ARMY OF SHADOWS, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, was an astonishingly gritty and involvi...

This festival continues as an upscale, boutique film venture for cinephiles, with only 25 features and innovative sidebars--including a critical overview of foreign filmmakers, with respect to both new filmmaking approaches and new subjects. Other major fests love red carpets, pay respect to commercial consideration and defer to megalomaniac growth desires; they need to present as many new films as possible, to have a large contingent of buyers and distributors, and to secure a sizable prese...

New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival 2007, 2/23 – 3/4There is a constant creation of new film festivals defined by regional, thematic, distribution (such as video ipods), or other parameters, propelled by a large supply of production and an ever increasing number of new film makers. This phenomenon is caused by expansion of film schools, access to low cost production equipment, and last not least public and corporate funding for film festivals. By now it is hard to ascertain how many fes...

Viggo Mortenson in ALAISTRE Thursday, December 7-----The high profile being brought to contemporary Spanish cinema by the international successes of Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER and Guillermo del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (both screened to audience acclaim at the 2006 New York Film Festival) has only stimulated the interest of international filmgoers to explore deeper into the prolific Spanish cinema scene. Giving New Yorkers a sampling of the blazing talents currently at work in Spain is the ...