Most film festivals can be summed up as a party, a marketplace, or a platter of cultural fruit and vegetables. Ebertfest, now 14 years old, is a love-in.

Chaz Ebert presides over the film screenings the way my mother used to usher people into her kitchen and fix them a heaping plate. Chaz’s famous husband Roger selects the films they show with an emphasis on love and understanding. The characters in Ebertfest films are motivated by love, hobbled by obstacles to understanding. When they fight their way through problems to find some kind of clarity, blindingly beautiful things happen.

One of Roger Ebert’s good friends, the maverick Australian filmmaker Paul Cox, said at a Q&A at the festival, which took place last week, “Our eyes need caressing as much as anything else.”

He was talking about the blunt, all-business visual flow of contemporary mainstream cinema, where every moment is sold hard and fast. The characters who attend Ebertfest learn that they don’t have to enter the theater bracing for a beating or a hustle. They’re home.

At Ebertfest, where no one mutters about the color of your ticket and the ‘Times’ doesn’t rule | by Steven Boone | Capital New York

It’s since been memorialized as one of the signature films of the ’60s, but in many ways The Graduate (screening today through April 19 at Film Forum) actually stands well apart from the youth-driven revolt that the decade has come to represent, according to Bethlehem Shoals.

If, like me, you’re the child of Boomers, Mrs. Robinson was an irresistible pop tune about an old lady long before Anne Bancroft polluted your mind. This distortion is telling; the idea of The Graduate was more important than the film itself, which wasn’t passed down. It became their movie, like Easy Rider, and I didn’t bother to watch it until college. Both of those films felt fiercely protected, somehow inviolate, wrapped up with a whole mess of concepts and feelings that don’t crop up in either movie. But The Graduate is useful when seen as a film that could only be made, or at least find a mass audience, right as American society opened up. It’s less radical than we want it to be in retrospect, perhaps, but then again, so was America.

What Movies Make You Ignore Everything Else? | by a bunch of people | The Awl

Katie Baker

Legends of the Fall: I’ve bailed on plans with friends multiple times when I’ve caught a glimpse of Samuel and Susannah playing tennis on that grass court and known I was now in(side) for the long haul. The only time I don’t stop is if I’ve gotten there AFTER Colonel Ludlow’s legendary chalkboard-swinging “AARGGSSCRRWWWUUJMM” scene, because if you’ve missed that one then what’s the point?

A League of Their Own: Someday I am going to produce a 10,000-word chapbook on why this is one of the (if not THE) greatest sports movies ever. And it’s worth watching all the way ‘til the end because the old lady casting is so completely sublime. I’d actually love to see someone do a side-by-side of each actress in, say, 15 years with her League of Their Own flash-forward counterpart. I feel like Madonna may have actually appeared in both roles.

Armageddon: And it doesn’t matter if I watch all 151 minutes or just the last ten, you can bet I will be choking back tears. (Also, I just went to IMDB to look up how many minutes the movie is—don’t worry, I’m not THAT much of a freak—and saw that it’s playing this [past] Saturday on FX. Setting my DVR now!)

Co-sign, but adding to the Kurt Anderson/Allison Benedikt/Michael Idov parade for Groundhog Day. What’s yours?

thirdstreaming:

http://bronxmuseum.org/eblasts/mixtape.htm

Oh sure, always a good reason to read Bethlehem Shoals’ review of The Black Power Mixtape over at Capital New York.

Sheila O’Malley examines Why Hollywood makes “Creepy kid” movies, and why America can’t look away.

Which creepy kid creeps you out the most?

Sheila O’Malley’s reviews of Best Picture nominees

“Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (showing at Film Forum through Jan. 26) isn’t just a unique prison film, it’s an alien one. Yet the details that go into Fontaine’s planning and preparation are the meat of the film. They may be transfigured by the gossamer light of the human spirit, but this is very much a movie about making hooks and fashioning sturdy rope. It’s a testament to Bresson’s genius that A Man Escaped could so resemble a home improvement project at times, and yet come across as neither tedious nor technical.” - Bethlehem Shoals for Capital New York. Read more.

MOMA and Film Society announce the first batch of New Directors/New Films Selections

The initial seven selections are Karl Markovics’ Breathing (Austria), Anca Damian’s Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Romania), Julia Murat’s Found Memories (Brazil/Argentina/France), Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias (Argentina/Spain), Joachim Trier’s Oslo, 31. August (Norway), Alejandro Landes’s Porfirio (Colombia) and Angelina Nikonova’s Twilight Portrait (Russia).

Anything you’re looking forward to seeing?

Documentary ‘The Black Power Mixtape’ offers a trove of rediscovered footage of the movement’s luminaries

by Bethlehem Shoals

(Available on Netflix Instant)

Meryl Streep’s performance in The Iron Lady is an event

Iron ladies: When powerful actresses play powerful female leaders by Sheila O’Malley

Women in the political realm are still rare enough that they continue to be seen as something of a novelty act when they reach for the brass ring. Questions are asked with feverish seriousness in the public realm about a woman’s ability to manage being both a woman and a politician, as though the future of the country depends on the answer. It is a given that men will be able to manage both being a leader and being a man, there is no destabilization of his socially acceptable identity in such a situation. When a woman wields power, it is perceived differently than when a man does. Women are still expected to play nice, smooth over altercations, placate, and assuage.  

We don’t have royalty in America, and we haven’t had a female leader of our country yet, but Hollywood has given us screen goddesses to make up for that. The movies are often a projection of the collective hopes, dreams, and fears of any given populace, and Hollywood’s icons have often been on the front lines of the battle of the sexes, and the ongoing conversation about a woman’s proper place. 

Here are some films you might have missed in 2011.

Possession: In which Isabelle Adjani’s sex scene with a monster isn’t the odd part

A privileged existence leads to guilt, and guilt leads to savage behavior. - Sheila O’Malley in her review of Polanski’s Carnage.