Festivals

I like crying a lot on film, but not necessarily in public,” said Andrew Lincoln in a special conversation at the HFPA's Comic-Con lounge yesterday. “So when I finished the (Hall H) panel yesterday, it was very emotional directly afterward.

Bill Skarsgård terrified moviegoers worldwide last year as Pennywise the Clown in the $700 million-grossing smash hit It, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. He’ll soon be unnerving viewers again, in a slightly different way.

Going to Comic-Con this year couldn't have been a more rewarding experience for Bob Odenkirk. It started with a reunion with the rest of the cast of Breaking Bad in front of the cameras of the Conan show on Wednesday night, and then it continued the next day with the first panel in the history of Better Call Saul in Hall H.

By her own admission, Sissy Spacek is inextricably linked to Stephen King, owing to her starring role in 1976’s Carrie, for which she was nominated for the first of her six Academy Award nods; eight nominations and three Golden Globes would eventually also stack up. “Fifteen years ago, this girl who couldn’t have been more than 17 came running up to me, pulled her sleeve down and showed me a tattoo of Carrie holding the flowers, with the crown, but no blood,” the actress told the HFPA in a special conversation at Comic-Con 2018.

Reunion gatherings are a tricky thing. Held too soon, sometimes not enough time has passed to either create or sustain a nostalgic appreciation for days gone by; held too late, they sometimes merely turn into a meandering rehash of hazy recollections.

There is no question that the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF, June 29-July 7) preserves and nurtures the great tradition of Central and Eastern European Cinema. Even though film festivals can be seen as collective products of a culture, the choices of this one seem conscious, and all point to keeping the idea of film as a poetic art alive.