_Jean-Luc Godard Interviews_ David Sterritt, Editor Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998 ISBN 1-57806-080-X Hb ISBN 1-57806-081-8 Pb 203 pp.

New York Film Festival 2000 offered a selected group of internationally and aesthetically diverse films. No trend emerged in the heterogeneous collection of offerings. The spectrum of offerings included both commercially viable and art house genres: the musical, the slice of life, the bio-pic, the meditation on history, the melodrama, the historical/political film, and the classics-on-film tour de force. Herewith a report on eight highlights of NYFF's program: seven beauties and a funeral, though not in that order.

Five International Cinematic Perspectives on the 'Nature' of Love and Childhood: New York Film Festival 2005 Report (Part Two).

In this year’s offerings, anxiety runs high and affirmation is a wan beam of sunlight in a stormylandscape. At times, indeed, affirmation is more chilling than reassuring. In a range running fromgrey to still more grey, the New York Film Festival 2007 collection of films portrays dysfunctionalsocieties and profoundly confused and confusing protagonists. At the same time, the films reveala strong trend away from conventional cinematic narrative and aesthetics. Opinions were radicallydivided at the press screenings about the success of the (...) risk taking on display. Boldly speaking outon topics such as Iraq and consumerism; shining their beams into the secret places of the humanheart, this years films did not yield anything like a critical consensus, and I shall report below,where appropriate, responses that differed radically from mine. The 2007 offerings suggest thatinternational cinema may be on the cusp of an energizing breakout, or it may be imploding underthe pressure an increasing dehumanization of the political and social climate. In this part of myreport from the festival, “Anxiety,” I will comment on the outright expressions of morbiddisquietude in six of the festival films. In the second part, I will address, under the title“Affirmation?”, the generally questionable optimism of seven additional films, a few of whichsported “cheerful” messages that made my blood run cold. (shrink)

The most “cheer” spread by this year’s offerings, if we stretch the point, was to be found in anumber of uncertain nods to the persistence and endurance of the human capacity for–beinghuman. Considering No Country For Old Men, Redacted and their anxious ilk, this might havebeen of some consolation if it were not for the way even the more affirmative entriessimultaneously evoked crushing environmental and personal obstacles between us and our finerideals and impulses. The films discussed below whistle in the (...) dark of war, murder, fanaticism,adultery, and/or abandonment. Though they generally made their way with the aid of gorgeouscinematography, editing, sound design, and frame compositions, to achieve their modicum of reassurance, they each get stuck in or play with the implications of painful or questionable philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

John Bleasdale 'Letting Go of David Lynch' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 42, October 1999.

Mike Chopra-Gant 'Theorizing the Couple: On Nochimson's _Screen Couple Chemistry_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 44, December 200.