Here's a little story I wrote today on this year's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the first details of which just came out. In the hottest days of July, I usually cover the fest from the windowless confines of Karlovy Vary's Hotel Thermal, a classic of Communist architecture, where I work for the English pages of the Festival Daily in addition to scribbling dispatches for Screen.

Jan Hrebejk's Pupendo, a film set in the Czech '80s (there's an English press kit here in PDF) is supposed to be quite good, though I haven't seen it yet; and I'm eager to see Joseph Strick's Ulysses. After starting the book ten years ago, I finally finished it this year. "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." How anybody managed to make a 140-minute film of that is beyond me.