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If the New York Film Festival ever fails to turn your crank -- too many established prestige pictures on the schedule, too few small fries waiting to be discovered -- you probably get excited by the many secondary mini-festivals that run during the year, to a fraction of the press attention garnered by the big event. The annual Film Comment Selects series has become crucial over the years, showcasing a genuinely intriguing range of international cinema, including films too obscure or extreme to get U.S. distribution alongside previews of films the rest of the country won't get a good look at until later in the year. What's more, you get to see them at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, a venue that's showing its age but still ranks as one of the very best places in New York City to see this type of film.
Selects kicks off this year with February 9 screenings of Old Boy and Clean. The latter is the new Olivier Assayas/Maggie Cheung flick that's being distributed by Palm Pictures later in 2005 and thus gets only a single, sold-out screening at the fest. The former is the Cannes-award-winning revenge melodrama that's being released by Tartan USA next month (that's according to the IMDb; I couldn't successfully Google an official Web site for Tartan's USA distribution arm). Other potential highlights look to be Vital, the new film from Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto starring Tadanobu Asano, Downfall, with Bruno Ganz playing Adolf Hitler (!), Izo, a Takashi Miike film starring Takeshi Kitano (!!), Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, the debut film from Old Boy director Park Chan-wook, Sam Fuller's rarely seen Fixed Bayonet and Steel Helmet, the Korean Memories of Murder and Lisando Alonso's Los Muertos. So far only Clean is sold out, but tickets do tend to get scarce. Why not bust out your credit card and check out the full schedule?
Posted by Bryant Frazer at February 6, 2005 12:39 PM
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Comments
Kitano appears in IZO, but it's not really accurate to say he stars in it. He has a major supporting role. It's a film I liked a lot, but I think it's likely to rub a lot of people the wrong way.
CLEAN is returning to the Walter Reade for "Rendezous with French Cinema" next month, so you'll have another chance to see it.
Posted by: Steve at February 6, 2005 11:45 PM