Big stars make small movies: Knightley & Friend, Pattison & Riley play on iTunes

How much fun is it to see some of your favorites film actors in tiny little movies that you can view for a song -- and in practically the time it takes to sing it?  In one case, pretty much fun, in the other, not so much. Even then, you'll get to watch a "famous" actor (Robert Pattinson) do better (and thankfully shorter) work here than anywhere else that TrustMovies, at least, has seen him.

Mr. Pattinson, shown at right, has been graced with a slightly odd but handsome-enough face, but his acting skills remain shrouded.  If his work in the Twilight series, together with Little Ashes and The Haunted Airman (that's all I've seen of him) is any indication, he has seemed both wooden and affected: a rather boring, semi-hunk whose connection with that hugely successful vampire/abstinence franchise was the lucky break of his life. Still, he might yet grow and go on to do some terrific work: Never say never, right? Here, at least -- with maybe two minutes of actual screen time and then gone before we know what has happened -- he seems less affected and more real and immediate. This time, surely, less is more.

Talulah Riley (shown at left), on the other hand, is the real star of THE SUMMER HOUSE, a 14-minute film in which she plays a British girl returning, after some time, to France and several older family friends.  We see her first as a girl. Immediately one of those "mentor" friends (nicely played by Marianne Borgo) offers her a drink and a little fashion sense, and -- with a new hairdo and dress -- she is quite the lovely young woman. With but a few minutes of screen time, Ms Riley manages this transition quite well.

The director Daisy Gili, and writer Ian Beck (from his own story) give us a very tiny movie that conflates, for no intelligent reason I can determine, the 1969 moon landing with this young woman's first love.  (OK: they're both "firsts," but that's hardly reason enough.) Because of its combination of very short length and could-be weighty subjects, the film becomes one of those "shorts" that either should be more pointed and succinct (see The Story of My Life, for a near-perfect example of this) or longer, so that it might flesh out what themes are on view.  It manages neither and consequently seems to exist only to show us that Ms Gili can indeed put together some beautiful photography (filmed in a lovely old house in the French countryside), performances, sets, extras, sound and editing -- without giving us much of a story. The Summer House, an over-used title, can be viewed via iTunes -- here, for U.S. viewers; here for those in Canada, and here for the British.

*******

THE CONTINUING AND LAMENTABLE SAGA OF THE SUICIDE BROTHERS is also a trifle but one done even more speedily (eleven minutes) and with a sense of delight and dark fun by all concerned. Somewhere in the mountains of Austria or maybe Switzerland (there's a Cuckoo clock on view), daily at 2pm, two brothers (Rupert Friend -- shown below: This is the guy who should have been cast in the lead of the Twilight franchise! -- and Tom Mison, both of whom also wrote this screenplay), try to commit suicide. We have no idea why, nor probably, would we care.

The two are watched over, perhaps without their knowing it, by a Tinkerbell-ish fairy (Keira Knightley, looking stern but gorgeous: see bottom of post) who may or may not want to protect them.  A few things happen along the way to a funny finale.  The acting is arch, by necessity; the situation weird but amusing; and the stylization extremely well done.

I can't imagine from where the idea for this film came, but it's short and sweet/sour enough that its genesis, in terms of entertain-ment, is beside the point. The short was directed by Arran Brownlee and Corran Brownlee, whom I believe are brothers (of the non-suicide variety, we hope) and whom I trust we shall hear from again, with a longer film. Meanwhile, "Suicide Brothers" can be currently seen via iTunes: at this link for the U.S. and at this one for British viewers.

ENTER THE VOID, the drug 'n death trip from Gaspar Noé, opens and opens and...

...just keeps opening, or so it seems. This is good. For awhile. And then it begins to bore. With his new film ENTER THE VOID the Argentine-born bad-boy of cinema (one of them, anyway: I Stand Alone and Irreversible pretty much place him in that select group), Gaspar Noé seems to have grown utterly besotted with color and visual effect.

Again, because some of these are quite marvelous, even original, this is good. For awhile. Mr. Noé, shown at right, is a repeater. If he can do something once, he wants to do it again. And again. If you took the repetition out of this 137-minute film (cut down, we are told by some critics, from a lengthier version shown at last's year's Cannes Fest), I think you might fill one hour.

A traffic accident seen over and over and over and over (see: I can be a repeater, too); visuals from the perspective of a bird, or maybe an angel, of a remarkably empty Tokyo that looks more animated than real (has this city ever been so depopulated?); and the camera forever zeroing in on anything -- and I do mean anything -- of a circular nature. Like the drug-trip image (below) to ash trays, toilet bowls, lamp shades, light bulbs, the camera lens, the burners on a stove top and -- oh, yes, nipples.

After awhile you may feel you've entered one of those children's puzzle books (granted, a very adult one) in which you are asked to "identify every single circle on this page." Gaspar likes hexagons, too, but in terms of sheer quantity, they don't hold a candle (seen from above, so it's a circle!) to those round shapes.

From the opening credits,  Noé announces his provocation: The names and identities fly by so fast you can't possibly read them. (To be fair, he then runs them by us yet a second time, but also very fast.)  The film is then shown from the POV of its main character, a very young drug-dealer (and -user) named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown, shown above and below).  But wait -- you can't see his face. You got it. The writer/director has decided to film (well, sort of) from the POV of the main character so that we see his hands and other parts of his body but his face only twice, when he looks in a mirror, then again on the table in the morgue.

And yet the camera keeps following him so that we see the back of his head. Note to Noé: When filming from the POV of any human being, that person will indeed be able to see his own hands, feet, legs, arms, stomach, chest and, unless he's very fat or very un-endowed, even his dick when taking a piss.  What he can never see is the back of his own head.  So repeatedly showing this to us, Van Sant-style, is simply nutty.  But there it is. It maybe that these back-of-head shots occur more often after the character has died (whatever that might signify). No spoiler here: the death happens very early in the film, and the remainder of the movie is taken up with the memories of the corpse/spirit/ghost and those many and repetitive overhead shots, as Oscar's spirit travels back and forth in time -- and all around town.

In addition to Oscar, we also meet his stripper sister (played by Paz de la Huerta, above and further above, right), the friend who betrays him (for reason you'll learn) and a few others, none of whom registers strongly. The "plot" is so small and thin you can hardly call it that. What the film finally becomes is a kind of visual head trip - which a number of critics seem to have embraced rather thoroughly. (My dears: take a pill, smoke a joint, but demand more from your movies!) For me all this seems a little too reminiscent of the 60s and 70s but with, at least, some originality of reproduction. Noé's visuals are sometimes stunning, and even better are the movie's sound design and effects (by Ken Yasumoto and Thomas Bangalter), which are marvels of the large and small, the shocking and subdued, and which never stop. You know the film is finished once your ears, as much as your eyes, no longer feel assaulted.

The final section of the film takes us to a "Love Hotel," where we/Oscar watch couples coupling, as above, and even see what appears to be a straight-ahead shot viewed from deep within the vagina as a cock thrusts forward (another circle image!).  This leads us to what I imagine is the filmmaker's great point: the connectedness of birth, sex and death (another circle, albeit metaphoric). This is not particularly original, but from the manner in which Noé pushes it, it would appear he has just discovered the idea and has a bursting urge to share.

Well, share he has, and while it may sound as if I am putting his movie down (OK: I am somewhat), I have to admit enjoying parts of it. But the adage less is more might be one for Noé to at least consider. Right now, he seems to believe that more should always be goosed into most.

Enter the Void, from IFC Films open today, September 24, in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Here in Manhattan you can see it on the big screen (which is how the filmmaker and distributor want you to view it: No critics' DVD screeners were handed out for this film) at the IFC Center.  For those not residing in L.A., NYC or Chi-town, the film will be available from IFC On-Demand, beginning September 29. Click here to determine how to get it.

New York Film Festival begins tomorrow: the very best from fests around the globe

Olivier Assayas, with one of his best-reviewed movies ever; the latest from Kelly Reichardt, Abbas Kiarostami, Mike Leigh, Raul Ruiz, Manoel de Oliveira and, of course, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (known to some as "Joe" but whose name TrustMovies has been pronouncing phonetically, if not correctly, for years now); a recent round of Romanian cinema and something new from Hong Sang-soo.

What -- that's not enough?  OK:  "Masterworks" from both Japan and Mexico; director "dialogs" with David Fincher, Julie Taymor, Ms Reichardt and "Joe"; the yearly Views from the Avant-Garde (that's one view, above); and a bunch of special events that really do seem special (a Mexican "Dracula", the life and work of Jack Cardiff, the Scorsese/Kent Jones A Letter to Elia). And -- oh, yeah -- a new (I suspect, if history runs true) "big nothing" from the one-and-only Jean-Luc Godard.  Plus cannibals. That's right: Its the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 48th edition of what is arguably the most popular yearly event for Big Apple cinephiles: The New York Film Festival. So line up and just try to get tickets.

But wait: There are actually plenty of seats remaining for many of the films in this year's fest, even if certain attractions are long gone: Fincher's director's dialog and opening night screening of The Social Network (with the ubiquitous Andrew Garfield, above left, and Jesse Eisenberg, at right), the evening showing of Taymor's Tempest, closing night with Mr. Eastwood's Hereafter; and special events like the one-time-only Letter to Elia screening, Mike Leigh: Shooting London, and the never-before-seen-commercially-in-the-U.S. Nuremberg restoration documentary. (As of late Thursday afternoon, 9/23, the above were the sellouts, so far.)

Yet there will be some really wonderful, lesser-known movies on view, too -- from Xavier Beauvois' profoundly moving study of religious faith and its positive uses, Of Gods and Men to three remarkable examples of early Mexican cinema (a still from one of which is shown below) by Fernando de Fuentes, part of the Masterworks program. I'll have more on these Mexican movies next week, including the new ten-director omnibus movie Revolución, which should bring us further up-to-date on Mexico -- if the current issue of The Onion hasn't done that already. I'll also have more to say about Beauvois' film (said to be France's submission for our Best Foreign Language Film "Oscar" and the movie that led France's box-office when it opened there a couple of weeks ago: god, those French are smart!) when it opens here, via Sony Pictures Classics, later this year (or maybe next).

Many of the films shown at this year's fest have already been picked up for release, and others probably will be.  So don't despair if you're too far away from NYC (or too poor -- as I would certainly be without my press pass) to afford to see this great slate. Even with that press pass, I've so far managed to view less than one-quarter of the films I'd wanted to see. (That's a scene from Taymor's The Tempest, with, left to right, Russell Brand, Alfred Molina and Djimon Hounsou -- the latter looking, uh, not like his usual self -- below. I'll see this one next week & report back then.)

So, those of you nearby and with dollars to spend, mark your calendars as "busy" from tomorrow September 24 through October 10.  You can find the complete program of this year's NY Film Fest, in all its glorious detail, here.  Feel free to scroll up and down and then click all the links along the bottom of the black banner headline at top. One good click will surely lead to another....

A MOTHER'S COURAGE: Fridriksson's film shows how to reach and teach the autistic

The last two times TrustMovies covered autism, the films in question had to do with diet and vaccinations and with the use of animals as a calming influence. This week a new documentary opens that is chock full of helpful hints on dealing with the situation when you have children suffering from this condition. If my use of the phrase helpful hints sounds slight or demeaning, it is not.  A MOTHER'S COURAGE: Talking Back to Austism is literally jam-packed with solid, useful information, some of which you might already know but much of which you probably don't.  The movie arrived as a revelation to me, so I suspect it will at least prove worth a watch for those who are interested in this subject.

The film follows the journey of a mother named Margret, an Icelandic woman with an eleven-year-old, severely autistic son, Keli. (The two are pictured above and on the poster, further above.) Determined to reach him and help him grow and learn, Margret  travels the globe (the family, clearly, is rather well off) in search of information and methods that might help, talking to the "experts" --  from well-known (Dr. Temple Grandin and Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, shown at bottom) to less-known like Soma Mukhopadhyay (below, left) whose austistic son Tito (below, right) prompted her to develop her own intensive curriculum called RPM (Rapid Prompting Method) that has helped Tito and numerous others.

We follow Margret and Keli and meet a number of other autistic children at various levels of development and discover that many of these children appear to have very high IQs.  When we see them open up and discover how to communicate, either verbally or visually, the experience is extraordinarily compelling.  If the title Genius Within has not just been used for the new Glenn Gould documentary, I would immediately bestow it on this fine film.

Director Fridrick Thor Fridricksson (shown at left)  has done a yeoman job of organizing and filming, keeping us pretty much fascinated and involved first to last. We come away from the documentary somewhat in awe of the several mothers (and a couple of fathers) shown here, whose all-encompassing need to help their children has resulted in breakthroughs that are slowly building up a greater understanding of autism, for which there is still no cure -- nor even anything approaching a thorough understanding of the cause.

Fridricksson and his director of photography Jon Karl Helgason have produced a documentary with much better visuals than we often find even in independent narrative films, and the scenery (Margret and family seem to very nearly travel the world) is often an eyeful, too.

But finally it's the kids who make the film. Watching them communicate and learn is alternately exasperating and enriching, making you realize that what we see here is but a taste -- and a highly condensed one -- of what their parents must endure.  But the rewards, we also see, are immense and joyous.

A Mother's Courage: Talking Back to Autism, from First Run Features, open this Friday, September 24, in NYC at the Quad Cinema, and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall.  Click here then scroll down for further playdates.

Tim Blake Nelson's LEAVES OF GRASS gets a quick theatrical drop before DVD arrival

Tim Blake Nelson ought to be declared a national cinema treasure, little-guy-level. This fellow, a triple (maybe quadruple) threat, can act (which he does most often, and brillliantly), write, direct and even sing (see -- perhaps for the umpteenth time -- O Brother, Where Art Thou?).  Oh, yes: he's also a sometimes producer. As an actor (mostly "character" parts), Nelson has performed in nearly 50 roles over almost 20 years, including some under-seen delights like Cherish, in which he plays a goofy, sexy leading man, and the very funny and halfway bleak/dark (a mode this actor seems to favor) The Big White to the shamefully underseen American Violet. 

As writer/director Nelson (shown at right) has made several notable films that, if they set neither the box-office nor the critical establishment aflame, were certainly worth seeing and mulling: the strange, disturbing, very well-cast-and-acted Eye of God (1997), his odd-angled Holocaust movie The Grey Zone (2001), and now the very funny and endearing, yet violent, sunshine-and-shade comedy LEAVES OF GRASS. (Nelson also directed the better-than-expected modernization of Othello, called O, also from 2001, in which Josh Hartnett essayed Iago -- to surprisingly good effect.)  To my mind, everything this man puts his talent to ends up worth seeing -- often more than once.

Leaves of Grass -- a lovely combination of  Walt Whitman and marijuana -- is an immediate appealing and involving story that allows one of America's best actors to play a pair of identical twins. If Bette Davis could do it, why not Edward Norton (above)?  The latter out-bets Bette, too -- playing (1) a somewhat uptight Ivy League scholar/professor on the fast track to fame and (2) his down-home, Oklahoma brother, who's a big-time pot grower involved with a host of shady characters. When Ivy League is conned into re-visiting his home town, Norton gets to slowly and very nicely shift the accent of the northern-based brother back to the south.  The actor does everything else just about perfectly, too. You can see why he wouldn't pass up a role like this.

The movie's milieu is both interesting and odd, and the supporting cast boasts the likes of Susan Sarandon (below)as the twin's mom, Richard Dreyfus (above) as a prominent Jewish businessman, Melanie Lynskey as the girlfriend of the southern Norton, Keri Russell (two photos below, a standout) as the smart and feisty young woman toward whom the northern Norton feels a pull, and the writer/director himself (at bottom, left) in a prominent role as the pot-grower's best pal. (Look for a nice turn by Modern Family's Ty Burrell, too.)

The movie zings along with speed and surprising grace, which is even more surprising, considering the amount and kind of violence scattered throughout the film.  It's sometimes bloody and shocking, even though it should not be unexpected in a film about the turf wars of shoddy drug dealers.

But so lovingly and delightfully has Nelson crafted his movie that we become involved with these people more as "friends" than as the paper-thin, action-movie characters found in most drug-themed stuff. And so we may get temporarily tripped up by the sudden darkness encountered. Yet, by balancing the comic with the bleak and black (while adding yet another dose of the dark-and funny to Mr. Nelson's growing oeuvre), the movie works.

Religion takes its licks here (at times the movie put me in mind of the Cohen Bros' A Serious Man), although the scene with the woman rabbi is quite lovely and benign (the women in Nelson's movies tend to be a lot smarter, deeper and more thoughtful than are the men).

From First Look Studios, Leaves of Grass opened this past Friday in New York City, Baltimore and Tulsa, OK.  Next week it debuts in Austin, Texas, and the week thereafter in Cape Cod, Anchorage and elsewhere. Click here for what details its distributor has seen fit to provide.

2501 MIGRANTS: A JOURNEY--a different immigrant/emigrant film from Yolanda Cruz

Quite literally art about the "immigrant" problem -- though in this case the problem is with the emigrants: where they come from, rather than where they're going -- 2501 MIGRANTS: A JOURNEY, is a new documentary from filmmaker Yolanda Cruz (shown below). In it, she introduces us to Mexican artist Alejandro Santiago from the state of Oaxaca (Ms Cruz also hails from there), a middle-aged, middle-class (if such a description actually can be used about Mexico) family man who supports that family via his art, and who decided a couple of years back to create an enormous art installation of 2,501 life-size sculptures showing and dedicated to each individual who had left his village of Teococuilco over time to immigrate to the USA.

The art as "art" is impressive enough: big and powerful and primitive -- with the machete swipes to the clay among its most interesting features -- but the project itself is unusual and important.  Santiago (shown below, sculpting) tells us that he had always come back to his village during some celebration or other, and so for years was unaware of any problem. Only when he returned one day during a non-celebratory time did he realize what a ghost town Teococuilco had become, due to so many of its citizens leaving to pursue the chance to work in North America.  Ms Cruz then explores what happens to these "lost" citizens.  Often, it is not pretty.

Many of them die en route to the USA and their families then must pay for the bodies being shipped back to Mexico to be buried. Most surprising, to me at least, was learning how much these emigrants, once settled in the USA, do for their former community: sending money back home (local banks are filled with this income) to the point that these emigrants feel that they should have the major say in what happens to and in their former home.  We also meet and watch many of the workers in Santiago's studio -- young boys and girls, men and women -- whom he trains and who learn a skill via his training and their work.

One charming note is sounded when the artist learns that he must keep these young people in their "element," so he imports farm animals for them to care for -- which also helps the kids feel more at home. This provides some moments of pure joy, particularly one in which a little donkey cavorts with some dogs on the property.

We watch as the sculptures grows -- and then suddenly are destroyed due to a major rainfall and flooding.  2501 Migrants: a journey is a kind of "reverse" immigrant story -- told from the point of view of the place and people left behind -- and as such it occupies an original and thought-provoking niche in the current "immigration" discussion.  The conclusion takes us to the actual exhibition of the statues in Monterrey.  Seeing these marvelous sculptures lined up in the outdoors -- on the green grass with the blue sky and billowy clouds behind them -- is beautiful indeed.

The hour-long documentary DVD (from Cinema Libre Studio), complete with an array of interesting extras, is available now for sale or rental.

Rogosin's ON THE BOWERY: the return of a classic -- plus a terrific new "making-of"

TrustMovies had heard about ON THE BOWERY for nearly all of his adult, film-going life (he was 15 when Lionel Rogosin's ground-breaking combination of documentary and narrative was made), yet only this week did he finally see the movie. Labeled anti-American in its own time (by the likes of Henry Luce and wifey Clare), this likely most-under-seen American classic ever was much more appreciated elsewhere around the world -- as we learn from the indispensable and information-filled documentary about the making of the film, THE PERFECT TEAM, which accompanies the original in its week-long run that just opened at NYC's Film Forum.

Finland, for instance, saw it as "a documentary with a capital D," notes one talking head from whom we hear. Yet the film, though documentary-like, was not a documentary at all. Instead, it was an unusual combination of the narrative and the real -- somewhat in the manner of the recently-released Alamar.

In that excellent Mexican film, writer/director Pedro González-Rubio uses people playing themselves in a film that is narrative but makes use of the roster of documentary techniques. Mr. Rogosin (shown at right), who died in 2000, uses a bevy of men (plus a couple of women) -- all of them alcoholic -- found on New York City's then-infamous Bowery and places them inside a filmed short story of his (and also, I rather imagine, of their own) creation that brings to life the truly awful existence of these "Bowery bums."  Weird facts department: This non-documentary was actually "Oscar"-nominated for a Best Feature Documentary in 1958. Well, why not? It had already won the BAFTA award for Best Documentary the year before, and the Grand Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival the year before that! (Please: can we now refrain for five minutes from arguing about whether or not Catfish is a real documentary.)

At this point, I should admit that I have major trouble watching anything with an alcoholic at its center.  Having spent years of my adult life working under two such men (and living below another for a time, hearing those bottles drop and roll across his uncarpeted floor at 2am), my patience with and empathy for alcoholics has long since dissipated. (I do not mean those in AA who have stopped drinking but still consider themselves alcoholics-for-life; the guys I tried to help were "drinking alkies" who refused to be separated from their bottle.)  So it's hard, very hard, for me to watch a film with this situation at its center.

On the Bowery makes it easier, in some ways, due to how beautifully realized it is.  The cinematography by Richard Bagley is superior stuff, and the restoration of the film -- based on original negatives preserved at NYC's Anthology Film Archives and carried out by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory -- is spectacular. As is the transfer to DVD. The film looks better than anything I've yet seen on Blu-ray, with the black-and-white photography so gorgeous you want to lick it off the screen. Tactile, full of texture and the richest shades of gray imaginable, the film is a feast for cinephiles who appreciate the art of great black-and-white cinematography.

So impressed by the look for the film was I that I immediately called its distrbutor, Dennis Doros of Milestone Films, to learn more about this. "It's great, isn't?!" Doros responded with his usual enormous enthusiasm. "They went from a 2K scan to high def. But mainly it’s the restoration -- and then the transfer -- that's so great"  Further, the distributor insists, it has to do with something else. "This is a film of close-ups. When the crew was all at Lionel’s apartment -- you see this in the making-of film The Perfect Team -- he tells them that he wants faces, and everyone agrees.  Well, they got ‘em! Very few films these days do this. I don’t know why. Shooting great faces, doing it right, really is a lost art.

"I suspect," Doros continued, "that On the Bowery looked pretty damn good back in its own day. This is not always true. The Exiles, for instance did not look as good in 1961 as it does now. UCLA did a frame-by-frame exposure to get this restoration. But back in 1960," he chuckled, "nobody could have afforded this. These films are so immediate and direct with simple plots that pull you in. You feel as though the characters are looking back at you. No exposi-tion. Nobody telling you what you have seen. Films that are simple stories, told artfully, really take you in, and this is one of them."

And this is a simple story (written by Rogosin and his Greenwich Village neighbor Mark Sufrin): Newcomer alkie (Ray Salyer, above, who may remind you a lot of Gary Cooper), suitcase in hand, joins a group of mainstays at a Bowery bar.  One of them in particular (Gorman Hendricks, seen several photos above, through that chicken wire, and below, right) befriends him, then steals from him, continually gets him drunk before finally....  I have to admit feeling that the movie goes just a tad sentimental at its conclusion.  But at just 65 minutes, it should hold your attention and pay you back with that superior cinematography, as it looks at a venue that had heretofore not been seen. And certainly not like this.

Immediately after viewing On the Bowery, I had so many questions, I felt about to burst. Fortunately the accompanying "making-of" documentary, The Perfect Team, answered almost every one of these, so I can't stress how useful, not to mention entertaining, this addition is -- an unmissable accompaniment to the original film. Made by the filmmaker's son Michael Rogosin, it's fascinating account of the making of On the Bowery that includes both recent (in later years Rogosin seemed to resemble Danny DeVito) and archival footage.

Michael details the history of his father's film and its crew -- some remarkable filmmakers who all had their own oddities -- and features two of the few filmed interviews with Lionel ever recorded: one by Russian film director Marina Goldovskaya, the other an astonishing 1956 interview on The Today Show, in which host Dave Garroway -- who admits not having seen the movie that he and Rogosin are talking about (imagine a TV host having the balls to do that today!). Ray Salyer also appears on the interview, and we learn a lot more about this unusual man, who very easily could have had a film career post-Bowery, but instead -- well, you'll find out when you see this double bill. The Perfect Team, a France/USA/Italy co-production, runs 47 minutes, is in both color and black-and-white, and has an aspect ratio of 1:1.85. (On the Bowery has an aspect ratio of 1:1.33.)

Now playing at Film Forum through next Thursday, September 23 (I apologize for the tardiness of my coverage), after which -- and soon I hope -- we'll see a DVD release of both the film and its making-of featurette. And since it's from Milestone, you know it'll look good. Mr. Doros, by the way, promises that we'll eventually see restorations of Rogosin's other two films: Come Back, Africa (another narrative/documentary combo about South Africa and apartheid) and Good Times, Wonderful Times (an experimental documentary that Doros calls "the first anti-Vietnam film."