Overwhelmed by the majority of the Tribeca Film Festival's program that I haven't ever heard of, I may just retreat to the very thorough retrospective of Krzysztof Kieslowski's work at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's
A Road Map of the Soul: The Complete Kieslowski. After reading that the Dekalog (pictured above) was one of the favorite films of my secular god, Stanley Kubrick, I rushed out to purchase the DVD set, which has been sitting on my shelf unwatched ever since. Only having seen Red and White, I revel at the ability to catch up with Kieslowski's work.

To counteract the disappointment felt that BAM's abbreviated Naruse series contains only films I've seen (though I'll certainly revist a few, notably Flowing which I didn't like and want to see again), the Cinematek has also announced their exciting Village Voice: Best of 2005 series. Most of them I have seen, but I am really looking foward to Suzuki's Princess Raccoon, Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation, the Nick Cave scripted Australian Western The Proposition, and seeing Tsai's The Wayward Cloud on film. Other films they are showing, which I have reviewed and recommend, are Bashing (Kobayashi), The Intruder (Denis), The Sun (Sokurov), Funny Ha Ha (Bujalski), Memories of Murder, and two by Hou Hsiou-hsien, Café Lumiére and his most recent, Three Times.

I don't normally post news about single, contemporary films being released, and this film is no grand masterpiece warrenting a stop-the-presses response, but Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent is a very good film, and the kind of subtle art-house film that distributors no longer have interest in spreading around, despite the Rohmer name. Luckily for New Yorkers, the Thalia will be screening the film off and on starting Sunday, March 12. My other excuse for this post is that I think the poster for this film is one of the neatest I've seen from a contemporary release, where, generally speaking, poster art is mostly photo-based and uninspired.

UPDATE: Once again I've been foiled by the Thalia's misadvertising. Their Triple Agent is merely a projected dvd (and projected off a lousy projector at that). Why they are charging for entrance like this is a film, I have no idea. The last time something like this happened was during their Kurosawa series where they advertised Kagemusha (1980) as being the longer, international cut. Yeah, except it wasn't. It took me two and a half hours to figure that one out. This will be the last time I'm ever going to that "theatre."

Blog-a-Thon, Part III: Robert Altman
The film blog-a-thons keep rolling in faster and faster these days. Pre-empting the upcoming one on Abel Ferrara, this particular one was quickly organized in light of the lifetime achievement Oscar director Robert Altman is set to receive at the 2006 Academy Awards. As usual, there are a bunch of enthusiastic, intelligent participants, and this time I'm simply going to link to a Matt Zoller Seitz' meta-collection and coverage of the blog-a-thon at his website The House Next Door: Altman, now more than ever. To the left is a poster image of my favorite Altman film, The Long Goodbye (1973), adapted from the stellar Raymond Chandler novel by Altman and Leigh Brackett, who wrote as diverse films as The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and a bunch of Howard Hawks films, including, not coincidently, the gleefully incomprehensible The Big Sleep (1946).

Blog-a-Thon, Part II: Code Unknown (Haneke, France, 2000)
A couple of weeks ago there was a highly successful film critic blog-a-thon over Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls (1995). Based off that success, Girish Shambu has organized another series of posts about Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000). Like with the previous series, I am unfortunately not particpating because (a) this website is not exactly organized in such a manner that I could produce a non-review blog-type article, though it is possible; but most importantly (b) I just don't rent films when I am at school. It's a shame, really, because this film was the first Haneke I saw, back when it came out, and it baffled me completely for I was then unfamiliar with that kind of filmmaking. I value the exercise to the extreme, and therefore wish to link to the various posts as they come up:

"Code Well Known, or How to Build a Better Blog-a-Thon" by Cinephiliac's Aaron Hillis
Code Unknown by Drifting's David Lowery
"Code Unknown and Crash: Collisions, Connections, and Catharsis" by Sergio Lenoe and the Infield Fly Rule's Dennis Cozzalio
Code Unknown by When Canses Were Classeled's Eric Henderson
"Cracking Haneke's 'Code'" by Flickhead's Ray Young
"Every Sequence an Unfinished Senten" by Esoteric Rabbit's Matthew Clayfield
"Some Souls Are Heavy, Others Light" by CultereSpace's M.S. Smith
"Blog-a-Thon: Code inoccu" by Elusive Licidity's Zach Campbell
"Code Unknown: An Auto-Dialogue" by Girish Shambu
"A Crumpled Piece of Paper: Scattered & Inconsequential Musings on Code Unknown" by Like Anna Karina's Sweater's Andrew Grant
Code Unknown (2000) by Long Pause's Darren Hughes

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's film programs always get my hopes up, only to realize themselves in unusually abbreviated form. Case in point is Man in the Dunes: Discovering Hiroshi Teshigahara, a series which showing only five films, two of which have been shown more than once in theatres in New York City within the last three months. Still, they are showing Pitfall (1962), Summer Soldiers (1972), and a new print of Antonio Gaudí (1984), all of which are hard to see, let alone see on film. Pictured above is Woman on the Dunes (1964).

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced their line-up for their Film Comments Selects 2006 series, something I always look forward to as a sort of New York Film Festival light, showcasing a bunch of interesting films that have yet to net distribution. This year's line-up is not as interesting as the last, and I will sadly miss the single (?) screening of Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven, but here is the list of films I plan on seeing this year:

-Ce Jour-là [That Day] (Ruiz, Switzerland)
-La Domaine perdu [The Lost Domain] (Ruiz, France)
-Diás de Campo [Days in the Country] (Ruiz, Chile)
-Shanghai Dreams (Wang, China)
-Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachtani? (Aoyama, Japan)
-Isolation (O'Brien, U.K./Ireland)
-Kinetta (Lanthimos, Greece)
-Bashing (Kobayashi, Japan)
-The Forsaken Land (Jayasundara, Sri Lanka)
-Loft (Kurosawa, Japan)

The Best Films of 2005: 01. A History of Violence (Cronenberg) 02. Tropical Malady (Weerasethaku) 03. Caché [Hidden] (Haneke) 04. Grizzly Man (Herzog) 05. L'Intrus [The Intruder] (Denis) 06. Café Lumière (Hou) 07. Funny Ha Ha (Bujalski) 08. Pulse (Kurosawa) 09. 3-Iron (Kim) 10. The Holy Girl (Martel)

A more complete list, which also includes the best "old" films I saw this year, can be found in the Notables section.

As has become routine on this site, there is a fairly large amount of theatrical releases from 2005 that I saw but did not write about. This may be from lack of time or lack of interest, but I feel I should at least indicate what major films I saw but failed to talk about. These will be listed in order of preference:

Wheel of Time (Herzog)
The Tuner (Muratova)
Dear Wendy (Vinterberg)
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (Black)
5x2 (Ozon)
Paradise Now (Abu-Assad)
Darwin's Nightmare (Sauper)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Liman)
Breakfast on Pluto (Jordan)
Constantine (Lawrence)
A toute de suite (Jacquot)
Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (Mograbi)
Agnes and His Brothers (Roehler)
Mila from Mars (Zornista-Sophia)

Though my page with the year’s best is both constantly up to date and always accessible here, which is the Notables section under the Reviews menu, the reason I have not mentioned the finalization of the list is because I was waiting to see Woody Allen’s Match Point, which I saw last night, and Terrance Malick’s The New World, which I’m seeing this weekend. I should point out that that section, like its incarnation last year and the year before, also lists my favorite older films I have seen theatrically throughout the year. Meanwhile, to keep myself amused, I wish to say that the bounty of Japanese films I have seen in 2005 has been the most fulfilling viewing experience of my life, and also the most plentiful. 112 Japanese films were seen, and I kept a running tally of the number of films by each director, for no one’s own satisfaction but my own:

I: Gosho, Hani, Imamura, Inagaki, Iwai, Kawashima, Kinoshita, Kore-eda, Miike, Morita, Nakahira, Nakano, Nomura, Otomo, Saito, Shinoda, Toyoda, Yamada, Yamamoto, Tamanaka, and Yanagimachi
II: Fukasaku, Ichikawa, Kurosawa (Kiyoshi), Shindo, Takahata, Teshigahara, Tsukamoto, and Yoshida
III: Masumura, Okamoto, Ozu, and Shimizu (Hiroshi)
IV: Kobayashi
V: Kurosawa (Akira), Miyazaki, and Oshima
VII: Mizoguchi
VIII: Suzuki (Seijun)
XXIX: Naruse