From the NYT:

The action in Volver moves back and forth between a workaday neighborhood in Madrid and a windswept village in the Spanish countryside. Really, though, the movie takes place in a familiar, enchanted land -- Almodóvaria, you might call it, or maybe Pedrostan— where every room and street corner is saturated with bright color and vivid feeling and where discordant notes of violence, jealousy and fear ultimately resolve in the deeper harmonies of art.

Pedro Almodóvar, the benevolent deity of this world, has revealed it -- or, rather, created it -- piece by piece from one film to the next. His two previous movies, Talk to Her (2002) and Bad Education (2004), explored previously uncharted regions of masculine melodrama, while Volver, whose title can be translated as “to return,” revisits the woman-centered territory of All About My Mother (1999) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). Drawing on influences ranging from Latin American telenovelas to classic Hollywood weepies and on an iconography of female endurance that includes Anna Magnani and Joan Crawford, Mr. Almodóvar has made yet another picture that moves beyond camp into a realm of wise, luxuriant humanism.

Here is what The Guardian's John Patterson says about The Host, a South Korean movie:

Bong Joon-Ho: what a fantastically evocative name. With a handle like that, the South Korean director could easily be an ounce-a-day pothead or an Asian porno superslut. Sadly, he is neither, but with his new horror movie, The Host, he deserves our heartfelt commendation for reviving the fine old tradition of taking an innocent monster movie and packing it to the irradiated gills with yeasty political satire, knowingly zeitgeisty nods to Our Present Plight, and plenty of digs at the squid-brained idiots we have elected to rule over us. In times like these we need more of this sort of thing.

Incidentally, The Host screened at TIFF '06.

From a fortune cookie:

You combine good taste with a quick mind

When a comedian is willing to risk being beaten or shot -- and possibly worse, to have a very fat man's naked ass and testes mashed against his face -- both to make us laugh and to make a point, one has to salute their courage.

Not everyone thinks it's a good idea, and there are issues in deciding how it will fit with the Arabic-language mothership, according to this BBC story:

Rev. Ted Haggard, head of the 14,000-member New Life Church and the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals, has stepped aside while his colleagues investigate a man's claims that Haggard paid him for sex.

From the NYT:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

The Pakistan government claimed the Dec. 1, 2005 death of an al Qaeda figure and four other men was due to a munitions mishap. Pakistani journalist Hayatullah Khan reported that based on his evidence, the men were killed by a U.S. missile strike -- a very sensitive topic in Pakistan. He paid for his scoop with his life.

Khan was one of three journalists honoured Wednesday night at the International Press Freedom Awards.

The Beeb's excellent Pakistan correspondent Aamer Ahmed Khan looks at what role the United States may have played in the bombing of a Pakistan madrassa alleged to be a militant training centre.