Fall features

Intense is the word Harlan Jacobson uses to describe the experience he expects audiences to have over the next four days, as Philadelphia Film Festival 181/2 - a jam-packed mini-fest that got under way last night in rip-roaring style with the hometown thriller Law Abiding Citizen - unspools 36 additional features between today and Monday night.

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, which split crowds at Cannes into camps of the aghast and the agog, is "going to set people's hair on fire," promises Jacobson, the new artistic director of the Philadelphia Film Festival. Peter Greenaway's Rembrandt's J'Accuse, a docudrama that examines the Dutch Master's famous Night Watch painting, is both a meditation on visual literacy and a tale of murder. John Woo's enthralling third-century Chinese war epic Red Cliff is - like the director's Hong Kong and Hollywood fare - a violent study in morality and male bonding. Chris Rock's Good Hair is the comedian's funny, insightful documentary on, yes, hair - and on pride, pop iconography, capitalism, and self-image in African American culture.

There are English historical dramas (The Young Victoria, with Emily Blunt in the title role), a crazy actioner from Hollywood-on-the-Seine's Luc Besson (District B13: Ultimatum), Lee Daniels' hard, heart-stirring Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, and the smart, Main Line-made teen comedy Dare.

Jacobson, the force behind the long-running multicity Talk Cinema series, was brought in by the PFF's executive director, J. Andrew Greenblatt, after artistic director Ray Murray and his team broke away from the festival's overseer, the Philadelphia Film Society, in a messy fracas this winter. Murray and company's rechristened Philadelphia CineFest enjoyed a successful 12-day run in late March and April, and will continue to offer a wide-ranging festival to Philadelphians each spring.

The PFF moved to an autumn slot, with a downsized slate this year, and plans to mount a full-stage festival in 2010.

"Having shifted our dates to the fall, we all realized that we couldn't wait until October or November of 2010 to come back, that we really had to mount a festival by the current fall season in order to reestablish our brand," Jacobson said last week. "We also wanted to bring a selection of films to the public that says this is who we are, this is what we do, and this is the kind of programming that you should expect."

Culled from Sundance, Cannes, and even last month's Toronto International Film Festival, PFF 181/2 is perhaps a tad less adventurous in its programming than Murray's CineFest, but it's a richly satisfying lineup nonetheless. Asked whether he thinks Philadelphia can accommodate two major competing festivals, Jacobson, a New Yorker, notes that because they appear "on opposite sides of the dial" they're not really competing - for films, or ticket buyers.

"Movies are something sort of like a fresh peach," he muses. "You really are rushing them to market, and that's what the mandate here is. Get all this nice stuff . . . and set it out on the table before it disappears. My aim is to find an audience for these films and hope that the audience is engaged by them and wants to come back.

"And that's really the only way I know how to answer that question. . . . It seems to me that Philadelphia is a city that is filled with people who appreciate art, who appreciate culture, who have an appetite for such things, and deserve the opportunity to see films that are above and beyond what's appearing in the multiplex."

Jacobson speaks with enthusiasm and insight about the films he's brought to town - which will take over three screens of the Ritz at the Bourse, and the Prince Music Theater. Ajami, codirected by a Palestinian and an Israeli and set in the Jaffa neighborhood of the title, is "sort of a Middle Eastern Crash." There's Shadow Billionaire, a doc about the life and mysterious death of DHL founder Larry Hillblom. "He essentially invented overnight messengering," says Jacobson, "which, when you think about it, is the last expression of the predigital age."

Another must-see (if you can block out all of Sunday afternoon) is the trilogy of Red Riding movies - serial-killer mysteries, each set in a different era and each from a different director - adapted from the David Peace novels about the Yorkshire Ripper. The little Irish absurdist farce A Film With Me in It, which this critic saw at the 2008 Toronto festival, will simultaneously have audiences bent over laughing and reeling in horror and disbelief.

"The film festival is a huge sort of floating shooting gallery," Jacobson says. "I hope people will say, 'All right, I'm going to give myself over to it for these four or five days. I'm going to see three or four, or five or 10 films and have a good time, and then it's over and I'm exhausted and it's done.' "