It's an all-Assayas weekend.

First, Michael Koresky's review at indieWIRE:

Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate arrives on these shores like a battered shipment of cheap goods. True, it's only sat moldering for ten months in its film canister since its Cannes premiere -- a relatively short period in these hazy days of distribution -- but it shows a distinct lack of freshness all the same. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing: there's a tantalizing whiff of mediocrity to Boarding Gate, and it's consistently set off by high levels of self-awareness and undeniable craft. Assayas's later career has been a heady stew of class and crass, yet not even in his terrific, audience-baiting pseudo-technothriller demonlover, with its corporate-girls-gone-wild for the smart set, did he flirt as heavily with exploitation as he does here.

Is Assayas truly putting forth the kind of loutish gamines-and-guns actioner his Irma Vep might have excoriated only a decade earlier? It's not exactly genre subversion (once in gear, it generally plays by its own silly rules), and it's not merely an exercise in style (before those rules are laid down, Assayas has a few narrative tricks up his sleeve), but rather a disconcertingly sincere stab at a particular kind of claptrap, a straight-to-video '80s thriller dolled up in a glossy art-house finish.

Click here to read the rest.

And then, it's just a hop, skip, and jump over to the main site for Nick Pinkerton's interview with Olivier Assayas:

REVERSE SHOT: You seem to have quite a bit of control of your own destiny, and looking at the trajectory of your filmmaking, there seems to be some kind of logic at work. So in approaching Boarding Gate, what was the big concept?

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: Well, I think it was definitely an area I’d been wanting to explore for quite awhile, something I’d been attracted to, and I’d been using elements of it here and there, and I felt at some specific stage I had to have a shot at going all the way. Meaning making a movie that, whatever it is, functions within some kind of genre framework, and also that’s fully an English-language film, even though it’s a strange English-language film, in the sense that a lot of the characters use English as a second language. But still, it’s technically an English-speaking film. And it’s things I’ve been tackling, I think starting, in a way, with Irma Vep—you know, it’s Irma Vep that was this break in my way of approaching films, when all of a sudden I decided for myself that it was okay to mix genre, to mix cultures, and that movies sometimes could be experiments, that within the format of modern cinema, within the format of narrative, you could experiment by mixing elements. So it kind of opened up the door to try things in areas where normally, as an independent French filmmaker you would not go. And I’ve been using, starting I suppose with demonlover, genre elements here and there. It also has to do with the fact that for ages I’ve wanted to make a film in Hong Kong. It goes back as far as I can remember, I suppose since I was there for the first time in the middle eighties, I’ve always had it in the back of my mind. And somehow, obviously the key to it was, again, you know, just making something that’s within the genre framework, and to me it was pretty natural. It was like a missing jigsaw piece somewhere in my filmmaking. Continue reading entire interview...

“What are we doing? How can we influence history? Can we influence society? That reflection for me is very interesting. Now we’re at a point where no one wants to hear about politics anymore or be an activist in any field, but nevertheless we feel that things can’t go on the way they do.”

So says New German Cinema legend Volker Schlöndorff in conversation with RS editor Jeff Reichert on the occasion of the release of his latest film, Strike. “A sort-of biopic about the life of Agnieszka Wolynicza (a terrific, bug-eyed Katharina Thalba), who played an important, if largely unknown, role in the Polish Solidarity movement,” Strike opens today in New York.

Click here to read In Solidarity: An Interview with Volker Schlöndorff.

Just when you thought we’d forgotten…yeah, Syndromes and a Century [our favorite movie of the year so far] has floated out of New York theaters, but Apichatpong Weerasethaku’s still in the news. His first solo exhibition in the United States, Unknown Forces is currently on view at REDCAT in Los Angeles until June 17— and several of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films will be screening as well in early June.

Meanwhile, this most docile, contemplative, and poetic of filmmakers ran into a bit of controversy in his native land in April, when the Thai Board of Censors demanded major cuts to Syndromes, for risk of its being banned. Apichatpong accepted the ban rather than make the cuts, and the event incited worldwide petitions against Thai censorship.

Amidst all this, this one-of-a-kind artist had time to sit down and talk to interviewers Genevieve Yue and S. Mickey Lin for Reverse Shot, to speak about Unknown Forces, politics in Thailand, and his upcoming project, Utopia.

Also, earlier: 2005 interview upon the release of Tropical Malady.

Currently playing to strong reviews and surprisingly robust box office, John Carney’s deceptively slight Once is a perfect antidote for the beginning of a summer season top-heavy with the weight of blockbuster sequels. A simple love story cast as a folk musical, Once was an unexpected sensation at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it played alongside a raft of high-profile duds. What follows is Jeannette Catsoulis's conversation with Once’s writer-director (and musician) John Carney, actor and front man of Irish band the Frames, Glen Hansard (Guy), and actress and musician Markéta Irglová (Girl).

Reverse Shot: Where did your initial idea for the film come from?

John Carney: The idea really came from being a musician and loving music. When I watch films I find myself responding to the score much more than the dialogue. I always imagine that the director wrote the music—when you’re young, you think the director does everything—and I would always be blown away by the music in Hitchcock films, for example. You can watch those without any of the dialogue and the music would just carry you along.

All day, instead of working, I would be downloading music. So I started thinking, how can I turn that into work? In the few films I made before this, I had too much music. So rather than going backwards and stripping away the music, I decided to go full on. What would it be like nowadays to make a musical with eight songs, very little dialogue, and a small story, just a two-hander really? So the whole project came out of being a musician and being a fan of musicals—and just listening.

Click here to read the rest of Jeannette Catsoulis's interview with the creators of Once.

Given the terrific reviews in Los Angeles and New York, we decided now would be a great time to post our interview with Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon, the filmmakers behind Cavite. Check it out at the new Reverse Shot. Perfect reading for Memorial Day weekend.

An interview with Funny Ha Ha director Andrew Bujalski by Reverse Shot's very own Michael "Hank" Koresky can be read here.