Fests and events, 2/28.

By David Hudson on 02/28/2009

Previewing BAMcinématek's "Focus on IFC Films" for Artforum, Melissa Anderson focuses herself on Philippe Garrel's "Frontier of Dawn" and Christophe Honoré's "La Belle Personne": "The two films are wildly different: Garrel, the dreamiest and most melancholy of the post-New Wave masters, introduces a supernatural dea ex machina, while Honoré's work, loosely based on the 17th-century novel 'La Princesse de Clèves,' plays like a Gallic Gossip Girl. What unites them is their star, the tousle-haired beauty Louis Garrel."

"Frontier of Dawn" has also screened in the "Film Comment Selects" series, running through Thursday. For Acquarello, it "represents an amalgam of the filmmaker's familiar themes: the haunting of a failed love affair, the helplessness of seeing a loved one self-destruct, the guilt (and isolation) of survival, the fear of fleeting happiness."

Also, "inasmuch as ["A Woman in Berlin"] illustrates the grey area between survival and exploitation, transgression and moral conscience, the complexity of human behavior is also reduced to predictable caricatures... resulting in a well intentioned, if superficial exposition on the untold victims of war."

And: "Alternating between taut horror film and absurd comedy, Na Hong-jin's 'The Chaser' is an audacious, if over-contrived and diluted procedural thriller." For Jeff Reichert, "Na Hong-jin's solid command of thriller/policier basics results in a comforting ride - thrills, humor and scares are well-parceled, characters develop, cheesy 80s synth washes abound, the police are all morons, and he's even managed to breathe some life back into the stolid foot chase (twice!). That he gets away with introducing a sad-eyed precocious kid into the narrative is merely icing."

Reichert's fellow Reverse Shot editor Michael Koresky finds "Lake Tahoe" to be "as affecting as it is atmospheric, and the overall impression is less one of self-conscious mannerism than of genuine heartache, an honest attempt at conveying a young man's necessary, if tenuous, stab at human interaction. At first, the whiff of Kaurismäki and Jarmusch is undeniably pungent, but [director Fernando] Eimbcke keeps peeling back his layers of detachment one by one, until something pure and plangent remains onscreen." More from Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail: "The adjective 'slight' is usually used as a pejorative when talking about movies. In the case of 'Lake Tahoe,' until the film's closing scene, I would have used that term and meant it as an unabashed compliment."

Back in RS, Kristi Mitsuda: "British filmmaker Duane Hopkins studied as both a photographer and painter, and this becomes abundantly clear upon viewing his elusive and evocative debut feature, 'Better Things.'... By opening with a series of static shots and cutting deliberately, disorientingly from one storyline to the next, Hopkins announces his intention to limn a specific environment, and the people in it, through textural detail, mood, and landscape rather than plot, dialogue, or character development."

Next up at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center is "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema," running Thursday through March 15. James van Maanen previews "Girl from Monaco," "Versailles" and "Change of Plans."

Anticipating SXSW: IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez talks with Joe Swanberg about "Alexander the Last" (site) and he's got the trailer, too.

"Alejandro Adams's second feature, 'Canary,' is a wildly ambitious and not particularly audience-friendly (in fact, you could almost call it audience-hostile) work of indie sci-fi with new-fangled digital aesthetics and old-fashioned Altman-esque dialogue patterns put to the service of an overwhelming and surprisingly fresh-feeling sense of dystopian dread," writes Karina Longworth, introducing her interview with the director at the SpoutBlog. "The film premieres at CineQuest on Sunday." More from Richard von Busack in Metro.

Also, a first review from the True/False Film Festival, running through tomorrow: "Without copping to the full story behind the story, 'glastonburykids' [site], though sometimes fascinating and definitely entertaining, feels incomplete."

"Gun Crazy," currently at BFI Southbank and the Ritzy Picturehouse in London before moving on to Bristol and Dublin, is "one of the pinnacles of noir and a major landmark in the love-on-the-run/crime-spree genre," writes John Patterson in the Guardian. "It harks back to Fritz Lang's 'You Only Live Once' and 'Nicholas Ray's incandescent debut 'They Live by Night' (filmed two years earlier), and forward not only to 'Bonnie and Clyde,' but to 'Badlands.' Along with 1955's 'The Big Combo,' it is also the benchmark movie by director [Joseph H] Lewis. Shot by Russell Harlan in crisp, pin-sharp black and white, with astonishingly agile camera movements and some groundbreaking bank-robbery sequences shot entirely from inside cars, and with crisp expository montages driving the narrative forward, it looks magnificent and moves along at a fearful clip."

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert Ito talks with Tadashi Nakamura, whose "A Song for Ourselves," premiering tonight at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo, completes a trilogy of films on the Asian American experience.

[Photos: "Frontier of Dawn," Rectangle Productions, 2008; "Canary," Canary Industries, 2009]

Tags: Alejandro Adams, Film Comment Selects, Gun Crazy, Louis Garrel, Philippe Garrel, Rendez-Vous 2009