This year's installment of the Los Angeles Film Festival has hit the half-way mark. Here's a look at what we've thus far missed, and what, if you're in the area, you should still try to seek out between now and Sunday.
Jennifer Vendetti's Billy the Kid won an award at SXSW, but Variety so viciously slammed the pic at Hot Docs that the film's editor felt compelled to write a letter in its defense. "For me," writes A.J. Schnack, "[Billy the Kid] was a revelation, an amazingly structured and beautifully rendered film about what it is to be an outsider...Venditti's film is so graceful, so funny and yet, at times, so difficult to watch, I found it to be one of the most humanistic films I've seen in some time."
Patrick Goldstein is quite fond of The Fall, an as-yet-unsold drama from music video vet Tarsem which has its LAFF screening on Saturday. Comparing the one-named helmer to Nicholas Roeg and Francis Ford Coppola, Goldstein tells a fascinating story of a misunderstood auteur whose commercial success may be holding him back: "Several execs I spoke to theorized that Tarsem's success as a commercial director worked against the film, saying it would've received a warmer festival reception if it had been made by a struggling Third World filmmaker instead of a chic director best known for soft-drink ads and R.E.M. videos."
indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has a backhanded-compliment for the LAFF film I was most curious about, the Darby Crash biopic What We Do Is Secret. Shane West, he says, "shines as Crash in the film, but his and Bijou Phillips' performances are much better than the film itself."
Also at indieWIRE, Michael Lerman calls the soon-to-be-released Joshua "a work of deep thought, worthy of note in the most prestigious festivals and sneaking into a commercial realm through the narrow margin of classic genre that it blends into its intelligence," and Ti West's Trigger Man "one of the best examples of five-dollars-and-a-dream genre filmmaking I've seen perhaps, ever."
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