>>Check out Jesse Hawthorne Ficks' TIFF takes here.

FILM FESTIVAL REPORT There weren't exactly tumbleweeds rolling through Park City, but this January's Sundance Film Festival did have a becalmed feeling reflecting the economic panic — money, corporate sponsors, and industry personnel weren't falling from the sky quite so thickly as usual, which naturally made the experience that much more pleasant for those simply there to see movies. Read more »

DNA science has taught us everyone is unique. Art teaches that everyone — even wildly derivative sons-of-bitches — are kinda sorta likewise (at least technically). Still, there's ordinary "individuality," actual distinctiveness, and then there's whoa. Belonging to this last category is Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson, who's made four features in four decades and surely won't be hurrying up anytime soon.

Does it really take him that long? Read more »

X-RATED CLASSICS A sexploitation lifer who reportedly has directed so many features even he doesn't know how many, Joe Sarno is nonetheless also enough of an idiosyncratic talent to have won a cult following and some high-culture-institution retrospectives. Read more »

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Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 After Life stepped into a bureaucratic beyond. His 2001 Distance probed the aftermath of a religious cult's mass suicide. Likewise loosely inspired by fact, Nobody Knows (2004) charted the survival of an abandoning mother's practically feral children in a Tokyo apartment. Read more »

With Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino pulls off something that seemed not only impossible, but undesirable, and surely unnecessary: making yet another of his in-jokey movies about other movies, albeit one that also happens to be kinda about the Holocaust — or at least Jews getting their own back on the Nazis during World War II — and (the kicker) is not inherently repulsive. As Rube Goldbergian achievements go, this is up there. Read more »

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Movies and drugs were made for each other — depiction-wise that is, beyond experience-enhancing audience and creativity-enhancing (or canceling) maker usage. Too bad legality and morality so frequently messed with that perfect union. Herewith a highly selective, hardly definitive list of the medium's

resulting greatest freakouts. Read more »

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In the late 1970s Australia suddenly looked like the new mecca for cinematic art, as movies like My Brilliant Career (1979), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Breaker Morant (1980)achieved unprecedented international critical and commercial success.

Those award-bait films are pointedly mentioned just in passing, for contrast, in Not Quite Hollywood, which is about all the other movies from Down Under during that period — those the tourist boards and arts councils preferred you did Read more »

When Dylan wrote "Forever Young," he surely didn't reckon on something that would make even the most yoga-limbered original hippie feel old: Easy Rider turning 40. But it just did, an occasion commemorated by the restored print playing the Red Vic this week. Read more »

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Even ginormous pop phenomena disappear from the collective consciousness faster than seemed possible during their heyday. Still, it's surprising that The Goldbergs doesn't loom larger in television history or general cultural awareness.

Admittedly, the show's heyday came in TV's early years as a mass medium. In 1949, when it commenced as a CBS half-hour, there were about 1 million television sets in use here. By 1954, at its run's end, nearly three-quarters of U.S. households owned their own boob tube. Read more »

Unsurprisingly, Israeli films have been a big part of each San Francisco Jewish Film Festival program from the beginning. Yet despite that annual local sampling, occasional theatrical exports, and Oscar's devotion (seven Israeli features have been nominated for Best Foreign Film so far, including 2008's highway-robbery loser Waltz with Bashir), the general narrative of how that industry got where it is today has remained hazy. Read more »