After telling us to get lost this year, the New York Times has come through and run a piece on the festival just when all of us were despairing that for the first time in years the Grey Lady would ignore us, just when we’d crept into a bastion of Upper West Side respectability. Credit for this one goes to Emilie Spiegel over at the Film Society of Lincoln Center who pitched woo to the Times long after we’d given up hope and taken to our daybeds in a state of nervous exhaustion.

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Actresses.

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Writer Mike Hale singles out a bunch of movies as “ones to watch” but the two he goes gaga over the most are ACTRESSES and ANNYONG YUMIKA. He writes about them at length, calling them two of the most adventurous movies in the festival, and while he wallows in the backstage, meta- antics and over-the-top diva-licious performances in ACTRESSES, he saves his highest praise for ANNYONG YUMIKA:

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“…a lark of a film with a serious, and moving, undercurrent, one that builds as Mr. Matsue single-mindedly burrows into Ms. Hayashi’s life. It’s about Korean perceptions of Japanese women and about the price of being a free spirit in Japanese society, at the same time that it celebrates a profoundly Japanese idea: the rippling effects, through many lives, of something as ephemeral, and even perhaps ugly, as “Junko: The Tokyo Housewife.”

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Read the full article.

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Mike Hale makes us all feel like pretty ponies!

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Comments (2) Jun 25 2010

Howard Feinstein weighs in on the festival over at Indiewire, doing three better than Time Out New York and one better than the Village Voice with “Eight to Watch at the Upcoming New York Asian Film Festival.”

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His picks include SYMBOL in the number one slot, COW (he calls Huang Bo’s performance “astounding”) THE BLOOD OF REBIRTH and (surprisingly) A LITTLE POND.

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Read the full article.

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Comments (0) Jun 25 2010