News

This is the third of four dispatches on some of the goods offered by the 57th London Film Festival’s ‘Experimenta’ section.

Wherever you go in the world at the moment, stray dogs are very much on the radar. First there was news that the Romanian government had passed a law to euthanize a million strays after a child died in a dog attack. Then there was the Venice Film Festival, where Taiwanese maestro Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs received the backhanded compliment of effective second prize. Though Tsai’s apparent swansong can be seen at the forthcoming Viennale as well as at Seville European Film Festival next month—with appearances at Toronto and New York already in the bag—the film was a notable absentee when the 57th BFI London Film Festival’s programme was announced. Though many rallied for its late addition, the programming gods proved stubborn.

Enter Taşkafa,...

Despite the poetry its subtitle promises, the fascinating crows-in-the-skyline doc Tokyo Waka is more informative than lyric, which is not at all a complaint. Directors John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson have gathered a capital tangle of flock footage, anecdotes, and mad facts—20,000 crows in Tokyo, sometimes attacking civilians, stealing coat hangers, and snacking on the zoo's prairie dogs! They've crafted this into an edifying whole, a film of beauty and revelation: Did you know crows are so smart they craft tool-like hooks from twigs, for use in digging insects from bark? Or that they know to chuck walnuts into traffic so that car tires crush the shells? Interview subjects aren't the scientists you'd expect: There are artists who have made a project of corralling the fl...

The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival (site), opening tomorrow and running through May 3, "will seem comfortingly the same" to many in the Bay Area, writes G Allen Johnson in the Chronicle:

[A] lavish opening-night film and party, a rocking closing-night film and, in the two weeks between, 172 more films from 45 countries and tributes to distinguished celebrities... But behind the scenes, it's been the most challenging year in the festival's history. Two executive directors of the San Francisco Film Society have died — Graham Leggat, who lost a battle to cancer in August at 51; and his replacement, independent film maestro Bingham Ray, who had two strokes and died at 57 while attending the Sundance Film Festival in January. He had been on the job only 10 weeks.

"It sounds like a line, but it's actually true that for me personally it was a relief that I had something I could throw myself into that...