A three-per-day press screening schedule sounds rough but I hope you manage to post your English list soon anyway without losing your pace, so we can see it before this whole Top Ten thing starts to seem old.

No, it wasn't anything about details of release that made me think your list was "odd." It's just that the stuff I picked seemed -- to me anyway -- more emotionally involving and gut-wrenching. I didn't pay much attention to the "rhymes" and intellectually "interesting" aspects when I listed my annual favorites. This is why I like Unknown Pleasures more than Platform or The World---and The World is a sign Jia may be drifting away from his own gut feelings and doing less personal more theoretical work, along with the public funding.

It doesn't do any good for you to lecture me about Cafe Lumiere and quote good old Jonathan Rosenbaum. I admire him, as I admire you, but as often find his choices weird as I agree with them. Even ardent fans of Hou Hsiao Hsien like Kevin Lee in Senses of Cinema (in his NYFF roundup) are expressing a fear that Hou's current views of contemporary life "risk being as empty as their objects" (even more true of Millennium Mambo and the last part of Three Times).

No, I didn't mean Kings and Queens was not shown here but just that there seemed to be no positive buzz about it here--and I wonder if this area is capable of having a buzz about a sophisticated film like that.

Devos is not just "interesting" but real and cool. I like The Beat My Heart Skipped (which she's in of course, if not at the center) much more than Gilles's Wife, I love the anxiety and intensity of it. The other one seems ike a deterministic kind of romance. I don't like stories where a main character seems doomed from the start. But I saw Gilles the previous year so I wasn't thinking of it. I keep putting in plugs for Clovis Cornillac. Now I'm also beginning to notice Matthieu Amalric who was so prominent in Rois et reine -- and he may be more noticed here now, for sure, after being in Munich, though Cronillac was in Jeunet's Long Engagement. Doesn't he get more screen time in Kings and Queen than Devos? What did you think of the big black woman shrink? That film was too much, in both good and bad senses. I'm a bit too much of a minimalist to be entirely satisifed by it but I can understand why people think Desplechin's a genius. He agrees.

Where you and I may agree more is that some of the best films we saw were not released. I didn't think so at first, but the unreleased in the US Regulier Lovers by Philippe Garrel, which Kevin Lee wisely dwelt upon, just sticks in your head -- and I guess your heart. Anyway though it may have seemed boring at the time, it's powerful cinema. And Sokurov's The Sun--heartrending and lovely. Dardennes' The Child--great. Cristi Piuiu's Death of Mr. Lazarescu -- terrific. All not yet released, and two without distributors. Marie et Julien did get reviews, by the way, that you can find online. DVD's get reviewed quite quickly and rather well, it seems, nowadays. This of course is new -- as are DVD's. Aquerello in Strictly Film School , DVD Talk , the apparently tireless Nick Schrager and Sam Adams of the Philidelphia City Paper [their site seems to be down now] have provided me with good DVD-related reviews recently but you may know more about this than I do.