Reviews of Today’s AFI Film Fest

Following are capsule reviews of today’s screenings in the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival at the Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza Cinemas:

‘Konitz: Portrait of the Artist as a Saxophonist’

Canada, 1988, 83 minutes 6:45 p.m. The music, by “cool” school alto saxophonist Lee Konitz--a member of Lennie Tristano’s group and a major presence on the Miles Davis-Gil Evans 1950 trail-blazer, “Birth of the Cool”--is fine, and so is Konitz’s company; he is a self-effacing guy with an occasional dry wit and an air of sweet, pleasant gravity. (His accompanist, pianist Harold Danko is a dark, intense fireball.) But Robert Daudelin’s documentary is visually flat, cinematically bland; its only strategy is to ease us into the jazz and the anecdotes, which, thankfully, are sometimes enough.