Fargo Film Festival

Fargo Film Festival Preview

With each passing year, the Fargo Film Festival continues to grow and evolve as the finest and largest independent movie celebration in the state of North Dakota. Longtime festival volunteers as well as regular attendees marvel at the depth and breadth of the work selected. Few would deny that the festival has really “grown up.” Led by the irrepressible Margie Bailly, whose recent retirement announcement lends the 2011 festival an air of the bittersweet, local cinephiles spend weeks poring over entries to choose the line-up for eight categories.

Time proves ‘Cronos’ del Toro’s masterwork

Film festivals are excellent ways to see new films that rarely get distribution to mainstream movie theatres, retrospective screenings of early works by major directors and/or older films that don’t even show up on classic film channels and aren’t carried in brick-and-mortar video stores.

Innaritu and Bardem Try to Make the Ugly “Biutiful”

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s fourth feature “Biutiful” retains the director’s long-windedness while dispensing with the criss-crossing, interlocking approach to multiple plot threads that he employed in the loose trilogy comprised of “Amores perros,” “21 Grams” and “Babel.” Inarritu, whose preoccupation with death hovers over all of his features, inscribes “Biutiful” to his father, but despite the closeness shared between audience and principal character Uxbal (Javier Bardem), the movie struggles mightily to sustain its nearly two-and-a-half hour running time.