Actually, They'd Like to Direct: A big trend this year was movies made by actors. Kevin Spacey's Albino Alligator is a static variation on Dog Day Afternoon. But Trees Lounge, written and directed by its star, Steve Buscemi, is a portrait of a budding Long Island lush that creates a mangy sense of community. It's like John Cassavetes, only entertaining.

Think Kink: Is it coincidence, or a zeitgeist trend, that the festival hosted three documentaries showcasing the dark side of sex? The most arresting of the trio, Nick Broomfield's Fetishes, is a not-for-the-squeamish look at what goes on inside the velvet dungeons of an upscale Manhattan S&M brothel. Screwed is an exuberantly raunchy portrait of Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein (think Howard Stern plus a lifetime of pastrami), and Beth B's Visiting Desire is a Warholian improv in which folks like Lydia Lunch act out their most transgressive fantasies.

The Return of Jean-Luc Godard: In For Ever Mozart, the new-wave hermit tries to do for Bosnia what he did for bourgeois civilization in Weekend. But Godard's deconstructionist games have grown threadbare. Far livelier was his press conference, in which the 65-year-old filmmaker, asked why Hollywood had yet to catch up with his experiments in nonnarrative cinema, deadpanned: ''I went to see Demi Moore in Striptease. What I saw had no beginning, no middle, and no end.''

Originally posted Sep 27, 1996 Published in issue #346 Sep 27, 1996 Order article reprints
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