Critical mess

Reviewing the reviewers

Okay, here's what's happening in the world of film criticism.

A peachy job opened up at the Washington Post with the departure of Hal Hinson. Many folks sent in their clippings; the word I heard was that the Bradlee bunch had narrowed it to three. Caryn James at the New York Times became a Times TV person, and then there were two. Finally the Post chose Steven Hunter, a well-respected Baltimore Sun film critic with little national exposure, over Newsday's very capable John Anderson. Now the Sun position is open, and clippings are being rerouted.

For 30 years, Judy Stone was the able film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. She retired in 1990 from staff, but never for a moment from writing. However, the spunky journalist has found herself just one more freelancer at her own paper, with diminished success at pitching cultural-political film features to Hollywood-oriented editors. Frustrated last year at the Chronicle's lack of response to several juicy feature ideas, she gave the stories instead to the San Francisco Examiner, the Chronicle's competitor.

A no-no for Stone? Is this why, when on May 1 the San Francisco Film Festival awarded Stone its coveted Mel Novikoff Award "to an individual whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public's knowledge and appreciation of world cinema," the Chronicle didn't print a word about the ceremony? Neither has it mentioned Stone's just-published Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers, which consists of 240 Chronicle interviews.

Out at the Denver Post, it's been six months since the new editor, Dennis Britten, shifted Howard Movshovitz, the paper's uncompromised, nationally regarded film critic, to non-celluloid feature stories.

Britten's imbecilic defense, as reported in the New York Times: "We were writing about films, and our readers go to the movies, not to films." When other reporters complained, Britten replied, "I am not dumbing-down the paper. I am . . . Pollyanna-ing it up, because I am looking for a positive spin on things . . . "

I telephoned Movshovitz, who lives in Boulder and teaches cinema courses at the University of Colorado, for the latest at the Post. "I'm banned writing about film. I've written about ice sculpture, paleontology, book groups, summer reading. They took the guy who was art critic, Steven Rosen, and made him film critic. And they've asked me, temporarily, to do some art criticism! I've covered some photography, pottery, tapestry shows."

Movshovitz, with strong union backing from the Newspaper Guild, has filed a grievance claiming "a demotion and violation of the contract." His case has gone to arbitration.

Finally, James Wolcott has split from the New Yorker to Vanity Fair, and his essay on the Rat Pack in the May issue is an extraordinary piece of writing. Also, Charles Taylor, veteran Phoenix arts writer, is the new film critic for Details.

TWO MUSTN'T-MISS EVENTS. This Friday, May 30, at 8:30 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive, we get the East Coast 35mm premiere of Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the hit of Sundance. It's a $10 benefit screening for the Archive of this five-years-in-the-making documentary. What's more, Morris, who's given us The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time, is a fabulous speaker.

So is Julius Epstein, the ageless co-screenwriter of Casablanca, who will be holding forth before a 35mm Casablanca screening at the Coolidge on June 3. He'll be interviewed by his pal the Globe's Michael Blowen. The gala evening starts at 7 with Julius's nephew, Brookline author Leslie Epstein (The King of the Jews), reading from his new Hollywood novel, Pandaemonium. Total cost: $7.

AND TWO of those depressing Eastern European films at the Harvard Film Archive, both for intense filmgoers: Dorota Kedzierzawska's Crows (1996), from Poland, May 30 and 31 and June 2 and 3, and Aleksandr Sokurov's Whis-pering Pages (1993), from Russia, May 31 and June 1.

Crows is a sad 66-minute visit with a bitter, neglected nine-year-old girl (a haunting Karolina Ostronzna) who races about on angry energy. Her mother pretends she doesn't exist, even as they share the same bed. The mother locks her daughter out so she can have the bed for her lover, then zooms away with him on his motorbike. "Mother, do I always have to eat alone?" the love-starved little girl says to the air.

Crows is vividly shot in some anonymous forsaken Polish town, everything seen from the girl's Dickensian point of view; but the film really opens up when the girl dashes off to a wild-wave primal northern sea.

Whispering Pages, like all of Sokurov's films, is, let's say it, a challenging experience, featuring the slowest pans of any narrative filmmaker in the world combined with the most active soundtrack you've ever heard. The murmurs, conversations, music all fade in and out of focus, as does the oblique, shadow narrative, which at points becomes recognizable as scenes from deep into Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, though, is called "He."