We already have entries rolling on Midnight in Paris and Pirates 4, both updated through today, and, as the Playlist puts it in a headline today, there's "Not Much Else" opening in the metroplexes today. Otherwise, though, there's plenty going on.
Migrating Forms opens at Anthology Film Archives today and runs through May 29. You may remember how promising that lineup is. "Forms grew out of the New York Underground Film Festival," writes Tom McCormack in a terrific overview at Alt Screen, "and it expands upon that fest’s interest in bringing together heterogeneous material: the celluloid revival of the American avant-garde, the rough-hewn outer edges of the European art-house, old curios, New Media, the academy, the grindhouse, and the gutter. As a result, Forms has some of the most unpredictable and interesting — and some of the best—programming of any US festival." Further recommended reads, even if you're nowhere near New York and can't attend, are Ricky D'Ambrose's preview at the House Next Door and Nick Pinkerton's for the Voice.
Filmmaker in Focus: Euzhan Palcy runs at MoMA through May 30 and BL Hazelwood interviews Palcy, primarily known for her award-winning debut, Sugar Cane Alley (1983), for Cinespect.
Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a ten-film series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on from today through Sunday, is "a biography in close-ups, accompanied by a photo exhibit," notes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "The individual movies are a mixed bag; Taylor’s sustained iconographic performance, extraordinary." And you definitely want to read Dan Callahan's piece on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Alt Screen.
Jaime N Christley in Slant: "If you only knew wartime propaganda movies from 1942's Oscar-nominated pictures (Mrs Miniver, The Pied Piper, In Which We Serve, among a half dozen others), you'd be right not to have imagined a film from the same year that begins with pastoral/tea-cozy/'there's a war on, ye know' banality before descending into a sickeningly giddy action thriller that looks forward to Straw Dogs, Inglourious Basterds, and Red Dawn. Meet Alberto Cavalcanti's Went the Day Well? (an adaptation, by three screenwriters, of Graham Greene short story 'The Lieutenant Died Last'), Mrs Miniver's homicidal twin sister, a sweet old lady from Ealing Studios who puts strychnine in your tea and rusty nails in your crumpets." More from David Fear (Time Out New York, 5/5), Michael Nordine (Not Coming) and Nicolas Rapold (L). At Film Forum through June 2.
Two films now playing at the IFC Center are getting solid reviews. "A poignant, homemade documentary of corporate 'arts' predators tossing artists to the curb, Lost Bohemia renders the recent history of Carnegie Hall Studios as both a painful, personal case history and a metaphor for the power of mammon over the muse," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "A complex of 160 living and working spaces built atop the legendary concert venue four years after its 1891 opening, the eccentrically angled studios were domiciles or rehearsal rooms for the likes of Isadora Duncan, Agnes de Mille, and Marlon Brando across the 20th century, their occupants the beneficiaries of Andrew Carnegie's explicitly stated desire to make the building an incubator as well as a showcase for the full spectrum of American creativity." More from Mark Holcomb (Voice) and Eric Hynes (Time Out New York, 4/5).
Ernest Hardy for the Voice on Louder Than a Bomb: "Co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel stick close to template in this fast-moving, visually polished documentary that tracks four Chicago-area high school students and their slam-poetry teams as they make their way to the all-city competition of the film's name." More from Neil Genzlinger (New York Times), Noel Murray (AV Club, A-), Ray Pride (Newcity Film) and Keith Uhlich (Time Out New York, 3/5). Brandon Harris talks with Jacobs for Filmmaker.
The Austin Chronicle previews the Paramount Summer Classics Film Series, launching tonight in style, with Peter Bogdanovich presenting a double feature of Casablanca and a film he's selected but keeping a mystery until it unreels.
More local goings on are rounded up by the Boston Globe's Ty Burr, the Chicago Reader's JR Jones and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. And then there's Criterion's "Friday Repertory Roundup," gathering info and links for events happening around the world.
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