Koehler's Will

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Variety critic Robert Koehler swears that Randy Walker and Jennifer Shainin's Apart From That, which played at Cinevegas and the Seattle Film Festival, is "the best American film I've seen this year." Here's his review, "which gets in some but hardly all of my thoughts," Koehler says. "If you like Richard Ford's and Raymond Carver's fiction and what I'm now sensing is a new radical American cinema characterized by films like Old Joy, then you'll probably like Apart From That. Then again, you may not. It would have done very well in competition in either Un Certain Regard or the Quinzaine, but for whatever reason Cannes turned it down. (It was ready for Sundance, but the filmmakers didn't submit it. Had it been shown in Park City, Apart From That would be famous by now.) For me, it's the U.S. find of the year, along with In Between Days." Koehler, by the way, is hosting an L.A. Film Festival discussion on Sunday, 6.25, at 5 pm at Westwood's Armand Hammer Museum called "Unshown Cinema: Inside the World of The Films That Got Away." "YOU ARE BEING DEPRIVED OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE HUNDREDS OF GREAT MOVIES EACH YEAR," the copy reads, "and you probably don't even know it! Of the over 2,000 movies produced annually, the average Los Angeles filmgoer has access to fewer than 400 titles. In a market supposedly glutted with new product, why are there still so many great films being made both in the US and abroad that you have no opportunity to see?" The panelists besides Koehler will be the legendary, frizzy-haired, never-say-die director Monte Hellman, Greg Laemmle of Laemmle Theatres, Warner Independent's Paul Federbush, L.A. Weekly film critic Scott Foundas, and bespectacled publicist Ziggy Kozlowski of Block-Korenbrot. Koehler warns that "your ability to see unconventional movies and visions that challenge the norm that is at stake." It is fine and good to challenge the norm, but you don't have to be particularly talented or inspired to do that. What finally counts isn't challenging the norm, per se, but challenging it in a way that turns people's heads around, knock their socks off and makes them go "whoa!" Is this something that Apart From That or In-Between Days accomplish?