Soderbergh provides more details about his planned stint directing a play at Cate Blanchett's theatre in Sydney.

And Focus posts a trailer for the Coens' Toronto-bound A Serious Man.

The Austin Film Society and Fantastic Fest's August 15 dusk-til-dawn Cinemapocalypse marathon in Austin, Texas will screen Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, which played well during Comic-Con last weekend. The writer-director will introduce the film as well his chosen double feature. Clearly, the Weinsteins are chasing the young male demo. The full release is on the jump.

Toronto International Film Fest announcements are coming fast. Here are the latest galas and special presentations, including Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man, Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, and Drew Barrymore's directing debut, Whip It. Full release on the jump:

Variety makes educated guesses at the Venice line-up to be announced July 30.

Tina Brown admits that even with 2.1 million unique visitors a month this June, her news site The Daily Beast is still losing money. But that will not always be true, she asserts.

Update: Gawker takes issue with Brown's take on journalists under duress.

Here's the new poster for Jane Campion's Bright Star, which will follow its strong Cannes debut with likely September fest appearances in Telluride and Toronto. Bob Berney's soon-to-be-named new combine with River Road's Bill Pohlad will launch with this high-brow literary romance. The poster seems designed to showcase the film's gorgeous young lovers (Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw play Fannie Brawne and John Keats) in a contemporary way, without the usual ivy trellised period look. What do you think?

This critic-friendly film is a soft lob down the middle for Academy voters, methinks--as long as Berney & Co. tread carefully, deliver a modest hit, and don't make any mistakes. That's a tall order for such an austere, tragic, intelligent, gorgeously crafted British period piece. But if anyone can do it...

While the studios will continue to spend $250 million on sure bets like the Harry Potter franchise, they are cutting back everywhere else. The town is feeling the pinch, as production starts decline, budgets are slashed and risks are not being taken. Ask Steven Soderbergh, who sounds depressed indeed in this Guardian interview on Che. (That four-hour Spanish-language money-loser for French financier Wild Bunch is the main source of Soderbergh's Moneyball woes.) For the moment he may direct a play for Cate Blanchett's theatre company in Sydney. Luckily, his Matt Damon whistleblower comedy The Informant! could score at September's Toronto Film Fest.

Here's the line-up for the Toronto Fest, which opens September 10 with Jon Amiel's Charles Darwin biopic, Creation.

Film Independent chief Dawn Hudson and new LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham were heaving sighs of relief at the sunny awards brunch at the Hammer Museum Sunday. While official figures are not in, sales of festival passes were down at this year's LAFF, but day-to-day ticket sales were brisk, with many sell-outs, Hudson said. While the various jury and audience award winners are listed on the jump, the real winners of the 10-day fest were the movies that picked up attention and possible distribution.

Winner of a jury acting prize for Shayne Topp, Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima picked up the most buzz at the fest. Submarine's Josh Braun is repping the mother-daughter flick set in Alaska. (Photo right of cast and director at LAFF awards brunch.) The epistolary film is narrated by 13-year-old Vanessa (part-Yup'ik actress Savanah Wiltfong), who tweets her disappointment that Philip won an acting prize:

although I won snowstorm survivor, philip won the lead in my life story. I tried to reach for the stars, but all I got was melted ice cream.

Winner of the dramatic audience award, surprisingly, was Cyrus Nowrasteh's intense Iranian drama The Stoning of Soraya M., starring Shohreh Aghdashloo, which is in current release. The doc audience award went to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's music movie Soul Power, which Sony Pictures Classics is releasing July 10.

The narrative jury prize winner was Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner (pictured) for Jamaica-set Wah Do Dem (What They Do). They worked nine months on the film, about a white kid who runs afoul of some Jamaicans, and hope to capitalize on their win to get a distribution partner and a music compilation album, they said.

Building on momentum from Sundance, Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public continues to grow a following. The film will play at the IFC Center in New York in August followed by LA and five other cities in September. Timoner wants to hire a high profile publicist to push the film for awards consideration and an Internet event as well. UPDATE: Abramorama (Anvil! The Story of Anvil) will handle the film's release.

Other docs played well, from Sundance hit No Impact Man, which pits passionate environmentalist Colin Beavan against his journalist/consumer wife Michele, to blogger/filmmaker A.J. Schnack's behind-the-scenes Denver expose, The Convention. Oscilloscope picked up No Impact Man just before LAFF, while The Convention seeks a distrib.

The Toronto International Film Festival is starting to post its line-up. The press release is on the jump.

The NYT's David Carr visits the source of the Evil Google Empire.

Don't believe all the conventional wisdom about advertising in a recession.

The LAFF barely got away with opener Paper Man on Thursday night. It had a highly regarded script, respected producer Richard Gladstein, the potential discovery of new directors Michele and Kieran Mulroney, and in the context of everything the fest was looking at (most of the films had screened somewhere else), it must have looked like their best and freshest option.

Paper Man played better for the audience than the critics. My daughter and her pal didn't care for it. I responded to the needy teen girl (Emma Stone) in the Hamptons and the needy neurotic writer father (Jeff Daniels). It's where I come from. But there was something ham-fisted about the super-hero fantasy friend played by Ryan Reynolds, who's so much better in The Proposal, which I'm happy to say opened great. (He looks starved, for one thing).

The LAT's indie columnist Mark Olsen covers the opening night festivities. Mingling at the after-party at the Napa Valley Grill were Melissa Leo, Dermot Mulroney and Chaz Bono; I talked to Groundswell's Michael London, Sidney Kimmel's Bingham Ray, The Gold Co's Joe Pichirallo and new Film Society of Lincoln Center chief Mara Manus, who's rooting for chum, new LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham. Here's a photo gallery.

I wish I had gone to Friday night's showing of Davis Guggenheim's ode to three blues guitarists, It Might Get Loud (which debuted at Sundance Toronto), because Jack White and Jimmy Page showed up. Here's an LAFF blue carpet video interview. Instead I went to a screening of the must-to-avoid French male fantasy The Girl from Monoco. No one warned me. Jeff Wells covered Saturday's screening and Q & A for the timely Iranian true story, The Stoning of Soraya M.

Saturday morning, I moderated a financing conference panel on the future of the indie biz, with producers Laura Bickford (Soderbergh's Che and Traffic) and Robert Teitel (Soul Food, Barbershop), Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff, Christian Gaines of Amazon/IMDb's Without a Box, and Oscilloscope owner Adam Yauch (Wendy and Lucy). They admitted being as much at sea as everyone else these days, although the producers were more downbeat than exhibitor Mundorff, who says business is good--up double digits this year from 2008. He said, it's not because there's less product (my theory)-- he still sees too many pics in the market--"People do want and will support the theatrical experience."

Mundorff is very worried about the trend of disappearing critics, because newspaper critics drive people to go to theaters in their local markets. "I have never seen a spike in box office because of an online critic," he said. (Scott Kirsner tweets: maybe it's hard to track impact of web reviews?)

Yauch said he was being presented with more product than he could ever manage to handle. He likes docs, but not because they're doing great business. It's more that he really wants to bring their messages to the world. He's hoping that people will start to bring more sanity to dealmaking and make films more affordable for everyone.

Bickford says the decrease in business on DVDs is a problem and means all costs have to come down--also foreign sales aren't what they once were, even when they were raising money for Che. Where the boxoffice to DVD sales ratio used to be approximately one dollar for one dollar, now for every five dollars of box office, you get one dollar from DVDs, Bickford said.

Bickford is high on the theatrical/VOD experience she had with IFC on Che. But that micro release was not what they had envisioned, and was partly the result of a slash in the number of indie specialty houses with even fewer Oscar slots. But everyone agreed VOD is where indie film distribution is going. And that film fests are playing an increasingly important role in getting the word out. And yes, movie distribution will wind up online. But nobody knows who's going to make money that way. Here's the LAFF podcast; IndieWire pulled out Ten Insights on Film Financing.

It's crucial that new Los Angeles Film Festival director Rebecca Yeldham programmed an indie opener for Thursday night's LAFF launch. She waited and waited and hung in for the right movie, long after her staff was comfortable, through Cannes. But she finally found her opener. "I wanted for the opening to find a film that reflected the spectrum of great movies in our contemporary film culture," says Yeldham. "We didn't have an American independent as one of the tentpoles."

Yeldham had read Paper Man at the script stage. She knew the filmmakers. "I was excited about what it could be," she said. "We had to see it manifested." In the nick of time, she and programmer Rachel Rosen were able to see Michele and Kieran Mulroney's finished movie, which stars Jeff Daniels as a man with an imaginary superhero friend (Ryan Reynolds). It passed muster. So LAFF is debuting a brand new indie film no one has seen. "I loved the idea of playing something of this quality for the home crowd," says Yeldham. "We're presenting two new directors to not only the industry and the public but to specialty distributors."

For Yeldham, who during a deep recession managed to hang on to most sponsors, add a few new ones and streamline without losing any significant programs, LAFF is "a distinctive festival. It's not just an indie film fest. We're embracing all films from all sources."

Thus Yeldham booked a few studio tentpoles into the Westwood-centered summer fest, from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (after all, the fest had premiered Michael Bay's first iteration) to the fest's centerpiece, Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and fest closer, Disney's English-language version of animation great Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo.

The fest also waited until the last minute to announce artists in residence Khaled Hosseini (Yeldham produced, with William Horberg, the movie version of Hosseini's book, The Kite Runner) and Thom Mayne, the Pritzker-prize winning architect. Hosseini presents on Saturday night The Stoning of Soraya M. After the screening he'll talk with the film's writer Cyrus Nowrasteh, star Shohreh Aghdashloo and religious scholar Reza Aslan about women and Islam. "This sort of rich contextualization of the movie might never happen again," says Yeldham.

Mayne will talk about architecture and cinema to cinematographer Fred Elmes, who shoots for Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch.

Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez will present a festival conversation with his three kids; they'll talk about making the family film Shorts, with a behind-the-scenes show-and-tell. "They conceived the movie and worked together," says Rosen. "It's for kids."

Some movies are being presented free, including Sundance faves Amreeka and The Cove. The LAFF is also assembling its filmmakers for an off-the-record retreat.

Yeldham and Rosen decided not to worry about where some of their fave selections had already played---a healthy number of films debuted at Sundance, especially--so 500 Days of Summer, Big Fan, Cold Souls, In the Loop, Paper Heart, it Might Get Loud, Humpday, We Live in Public, Black Dynamite, Soul Power, and When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors are all in the program. "Plenty of American independents didn't meet the standards for our programmers," says Yeldham. "Beautiful movies need support. We don't censor anything. I'd rather present films we can stand behind. We're aggressively launching new talent and movies too."

IndieWire posts interviews with LAFF directors.

Here are Yeldham profiles in the LAT and LA Weekly.

One's Japanese, the other isn't. And there's the rub.

While John Lasseter's Disney animation division and producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall have supervised the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki's latest anime film, Ponyo--already a hit overseas--the film is still magical and yes, very Japanese. (It closes the LAFF June 28; Miyazaki will appear at Comic-Con in July before the film opens in North America on August 14.) Lasseter is banking that with proper handling from Disney, the movie could break out to family audiences in a way none of Miyazaki's imports ever have, even with one Oscar nomination (Howl's Moving Castle) and one win (Spirited Away). Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon and Betty White are among the stars providing voice talent on Ponyo.

Fast Company lists Miyazaki as one of the top ten most creative people in film and TV. Wired lists the best anime coming out this summer.

I've been a huge Miyazaki fan, from My Neighbor Totoro through Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and beyond. Ponyo is also sublime. Like all great movies it whisks you effortlessly into another world. And it's old-fashioned, hand-drawn 2-D (not an ounce of CG in it), stylized animation. Miyazaki has always been able to capture the forces of nature and the great outdoors, in this case, the ocean that menaces the Japanese coast in the form of a tsunami. The movie lacks violence or anything urban: nature provides the story's threat and drama. Don't miss this one.

The Seattle Film Fest debuted another movie from a Japanese source. Hachi: A Dog's Story is a remake of Hachiko, based on a famous true story from the 20s. Loyal Akita Hachiko met his beloved master every day at the train station, and after the gentleman died of a stroke and never returned, escaped each of his new homes to wait for his master, faithfully every day, through heat, rain and snow, until he died ten years later (sob).

Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog) took on the American remake with Richard Gere in the role of the professor who bonds with his dog. (The two men are friends and neighbors and worked together on Hoax.) But the movie twists itself into a pretzel explaining how a Japanese dog named Hachiko came to America, met the professor, got into the habit of waiting for him at the train every day--and kept waiting. There's a wife (Joan Allen) and a very slim family narrative. The movie doesn't work. Yet the bones of the story are still so powerful (which is why Gere and Hallstrom wanted to do it), that the Seattle audience and I were all in tears.

The movie's financeer, international sales co.Inferno Distribution, has a pact with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group for North American and Australian ancillary rights to its movies. Inferno is negotiating with service distrib Consolidated Pictures Group (led by Bottle Shock filmmaker Randall Miller, who’s releasing I Love You Phillip Morris), which is looking to raise some P & A for a fall release.

But the movie really belongs at Disney, where the family label would mean something. Gere's agent Ed Limato showed the movie to Disney's Dick Cook, but the studio passed. Inferno's Bill Johnson changed the title from Hachiko to Hachi because he was afraid it would put off American audiences. "Hachi is more reminiscent of Benji," he said.

Check out the original Hachiko. Like Ponyo, it's the authentic real deal.

I'm heading home from four days at the Seattle International Film festival (SIFF), the largest film festival in the U.S., "a ridiculously huge annual event," joked SIFF managing director Deborah Person at the closing awards brunch at the Seattle Needle. Many people turned up, exceeding last year's attendance, despite a recession and 25 days of glorious sunny weather in a row--the clouds rolled in on the last day.

SIFF showed 268 features and 124 shorts from 62 countries, with 31 world premieres, 45 North American premieres, and 13 US premieres. 80 films sold out, and 60,000 ballots were cast for the audience awards, which went to best film Black Dynamite, best actor Sam Rockwell (Moon), best actress Yolande Moreau (Seraphine), best director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and best doc The Cove.

I was on the doc jury along with indie producer Paul Federbush and Aleksandra Biernacka of TV Polska; we awarded our grand jury prize to Talhotblond, an amazing truth-is-stranger-than-fiction crime doc about internet sex-texters whose fantasy lives take over. (Full list of winners on jump.) "This is the first thing I've ever won, ever," said Black Dynamite director Scott Sanders (pictured with Amreeka director Cherien Dabis). "It's unexpected. My movie's about pimps and kung fu and boobs and stuff."

Whenever the fest has tried to cut back, fest founder Dan Ireland told me, their loyal customers protested. (I recommend cutting back by one day a year.) But they seem to revel in their sprawling breadth. Artistic director Carl Spence admitted to cutting the budget back by 25%. But nonetheless the fest brought up 373 guests, including Francis Ford Coppola (Tetro) and Spike Lee (Passing Strange). "We showed more films than ever before," boasted Spence.

This year the Seattle International Film Festival introduced iSIFF, a nifty mobile iPhone app for organizing your festival schedule (downloadable via iTunes).

The iSIFF uses a visual filtering tool - the SIFFter - that helps you to sort through more than 400 films by country, genre, or venue. Plus it accesses trailers, maps, the SIFF Twitterfeed and lets you actually buy the tickets.

It made me want to own an iPhone. I feel this way often--but I must search my email!

In keeping with Film Independent's recent policy of pursuing Hollywood studio summer movies, the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival will include as its Centerpiece a Sony gangster movie, Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger. The fifteenth LAFF will run from Thursday, June 18 to Sunday, June 28 and will screen over 200 feature films, shorts, and music videos from more than 30 countries, selected from 4,600 submissions. For the first time under fest director Rebecca Yeldham, international films will be included in the narrative and documentary competition categories. The opening and closing night films and other details of the event are still to be announced.

The LAFF program includes many world premieres plus several Sundance must-sees: We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner, Amreeka, Cherien Dabis, Humpday, Lynn Shelton, In the Loop, Armando Iannucci and It Might Get Loud, Davis Guggenheim.

Passes go on sale May 18 to the general public; general admission tickets to individual films go on sale May 29. Info at LAFilmFest.com. The full list of films is on the jump.

Much like Michael Moore, Kirby Dick (Twist of Faith, This Film is Not Yet Rated) has a talent for putting himself front and center in his documentaries, as well as making them controversial and entertaining. Clearly his latest, Outrage, which is debuting at the Tribeca Film Fest, is no exception. Magnolia will release the agitprop doc on May 8.

Here's early reaction from Wilshire and Washington, Movieline and IndieWire.

In the movie business, the mix of art and commerce is always tricky. Some people have taste and talent smarts, but no business acumen. Developing a good script is one thing, but getting it produced is another. The ability to smell a hit is a weapon that only some producers have in their arsenal. Others easily churn out "product" but wouldn't know a good movie if it hit them on the head. When one person combines taste, quality control, and business moxy, then you get the rarest thing of all in Hollywood: a consistent track record.

Jim Stern of Endgame Entertainment is on a roll. While he varies his level of investment and responsibility in three to four projects a year, he had the sense to nail down significant pieces of several upcoming quality movies. At the recent Toronto Film Festival, during a time when self-distribution is the best option available to many indies, Stern went in with one film already sold: The Brothers Bloom, a caper comedy starring Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, which was pre-bought by Summit Entertainment (now set for release May 29). Two Endgame films also sold to Sony Pictures Classics: BBC Film's Noel Coward period comedy Easy Virtue, starring Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes and Colin Firth, and Every Little Step , a doc about the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line, featuring Broadway's first-ever filmed auditions, which Stern financed and co-directed with frequent collaborator Adam Del Deo. And at Sundance in January, Sony Pictures Classics also acquired Lone Scherfig and Nick Hornby's BBC film An Education, which Stern partly funded.

Not bad, having your own production funding. But the question is, how do you use it? In the case of Every Little Step, which opened April 17 to strong reviews, Stern was in a position to know what to do. The Chicago-born theater major from the University of Michigan had produced sixteen Broadway shows, including Stomp, The Producers, and Hairspray. He had produced such films as Proof and Stage Beauty. Stern had directed three films with Del Deo, on basketball, politics and theater. And he had financed a number of films, plays and TV shows since he founded Endgame in 2003. "It really helps being a director," Stern says, "even when I'm producing. It makes things easier and smoother when it's easy to understand what people are trying to do. All you ask is that the director makes the film they say they're going to make."

All Stern's experience came together with the doc Every Little Step when an old theater acquaintance, attorney John Breglio, gave him the Michael Bennett tapes from the snowy night in 1974 when he first conceived of A Chorus Line at a 12-hour marathon session with 19 dancers. When Stern heard the tapes, he felt chills and thought, "This is a movie."

Stern and Del Deo shot some 500 hours of video, and waded through tons of archived footage. With first-time ever permission from Actors' Equity to shoot auditions for the new show, the filmmakers began following 50 to 60 singer/dancers, often using four cameras to capture key moments. "Fortunately in this world, people were used to cameras," says Stern, who knew he had "doc gold" when director Bob Avian wept as Jason Tam nailed his audition as Paul. "We were like flies on the wall. You shoot first and ask questions later."

Cannes is a no-go for Francis Ford Coppola's Argentinian film Tetro, which he is taking to San Francisco and Seattle fests instead. Coppola released a statement to The Circuit:

“While I very much appreciate the invitation, this is an independent film, self-financed and self released, and I felt that being invited for a non-competition gala screening wasn’t true to the personal and independent nature of this film. More important than Cannes, our team can focus all our time, energy and resources into the U.S. release this June 11th.”

Sony Pictures Classics paid handsomely to acquire Coppola's last indie film, the $10-million Youth Without Youth, which Coppola refused to take on the fest circuit. The film earned $239,495 at the domestic boxoffice. This time Coppola will self-distribute through his own American Zoetrope.

Thomas Haden Church is one of those great actors who never caught the right break. I met him on the set of Tombstone in 1993 when he was at the height of his masculine, youthful glory. Everyone on that set knew Church was good. A decade later, Sideways showed what he could do. And in Walter Hill's Emmy-winning western Broken Trail, Church held his own against Robert Duvall. Next up: the dark relationship drama Don McKay, which world premieres April 24 at Tribeca, where Hunting Lane is seeking a buyer.

In rookie director Jake Goldberger's twisty thriller, Church stars as a janitor who returns to his hometown at the behest of his old girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue), who says she is dying, and finds that everything is not as it seems. Melissa Leo co-stars. Church talks about the movie; here's an early peek:

Spike Lee and Francis Ford Coppola will attend the country's largest and most sprawling marathon of film fests in Seattle, which runs May 21 through June 14. The 35th SIFF will present the 2009 Golden Space Needle Award for Outstanding Achievement in Directing on May 23 to Lee, who will show his music doc Passing Strange and do a Q & A. (Passing Strange debuted at Sundance, played SXSW, will play Tribeca. The film is expected to close a deal with IFC Films and PBS.)

Coppola will present his latest indie effort, the semi-autobiographical Tetro. Set in Argentina, the film marks Coppola's first original script since 1974. Vincent Gallo, who stars as one of two brothers trying to reconcile their past, will also accompany the film on June 10. Coppola, who debuts the film at the San Francisco Film Fest, will self-distribute the film through American Zoetrope this June. is seeking a U.S. distributor.

I'll be attending the fest as a member of the doc jury. The complete SIFF program schedule will be available Thursday, May 7 at SIFF.net

As advertising revenues continue to skid, Reed Business Information announced layoffs of 7 % across all its divisions, plus possible unpaid leaves for staffers. Daily Variety executive editor Michael Speier was among the second round of layoffs at the trade; TV reporter Dan Frankel and New York bureau chief Dade Hayes were also let go. UPDATE: Here's a follow-up from The Wrap.

This year the recession is also hitting the 22-year-old American Pavilion at Cannes. The Americans' home-away-from-home, complete with food bar, computers, mailboxes, panels and the occasional live satellite feed, may run in the red for the first time if founder and director Julie Sisk can't find any sponsors with cash. For the first time, Sisk has no airline partner; former sponsors Apple, Kodak, HP, Cisco, Flip Cam, Access Hollywood and the LAT are all no-gos this year.

While the Am Pav's membership and college film student programs bring in income, without any newspaper or tech sponsors the Pavilion may not be able to break even. Unlike the other national pavilions lined up along the Cannes Croisette, Sisk has always managed the Am Pav without any government backing. Brother, can you spare a dime?

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has replaced outgoing New York film fest selection committee member Kent Jones (who was also associate programming director) with ex-Village Voice editor/critic Dennis Lim, who teaches criticism at NYU and edits Moving Image Source.

The committee now boasts two critics who have lost full-time staff jobs: former Time Out New York film editor Melissa Anderson has also joined the NYFF selecting group chaired by Film Society program director Richard Pena. Other members are Voice critic J. Hoberman and LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas. They will choose the 20-25 features for this fall's 47th NYFF, which returns to the renovated Alice Tully Hall from September 25 to October 11. The first major retrospective of Chinese cinema from 1949 through 1966 is planned, along with a tribute to the late Hindi auteur Guru Dutt. Jones left the Film Society (one of many personnel changes since ex-studio exec Mara Manus took over the organization) to work on a film project with old mentor Martin Scorsese. The NYorker's Richard Brody sings his praises.

The NYFF has stayed the course over more than four decades, remaining focused on a small program of domestic and foreign art films, many of them culled from other fests like Cannes. Since its start in 1963, other fests, from Toronto to Sundance, have overshadowed the fall fest, which remains a classy, well-attended local NYC event. The arrival of Sundance star Geoff Gilmore to New York's Tribeca Enterprises and fest is being watched closely.

Boston Phoenix critic Gerald Peary's long-gestating doc For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism is finally done. Appropriately, for a film hatched nine years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, Peary is taking his self-financed labor of love, produced with wife Amy Geller with foundation grants and funds from friends, on the film fest circuit, first to SXSW, and next, this month's San Francisco International Film Fest.

Peary conducted the first interviews in 2001, strangely enough, at the World Trade Center at a meeting of the New York Film Critics Association, a few months before 9/11. "Now the movie is filled with people without jobs," says Peary, whose primary income comes from running the film department at Boston's Suffolk University. He keeps having to go back into the film and change titles to "ex-critic." His subjects, including a plumper, talking Roger Ebert, will also see themselves captured at a younger age.

Thus the film, which offers an excellent history of American film criticism, also serves as a valentine to a vanishing profession, something Peary could never have foreseen. He interviewed the critics he could catch, at Toronto right after 9/11, in Cannes, and in New York. He asked them to answer the personal question: "Why am I a film critic?" And he got them to talk about their earliest film memories. "The stupidest view is that film critics don't like anything," says Peary. "Most critics are smitten at an early age, you can see the shine in their eyes."

As Peary fashioned his 100-year-narrative of criticism, he leaned on the likes of Richard Schickel to share his fave critics such as obscure early writers Frank Woods and Robert Sherwood, and filmmaker John Waters, who reveres Parker Tyler. Peary goes back to the days when Andrew Sarris first espoused the auteur theory and the merits of Budd Boetticher and Douglas Sirk in the pages of Film Culture, which led to the wars between the auteurists led by Sarris and Pauline Kael and her Paulettes. "A good doc teaches you something," says Peary.

Even the late Kael and Manny Farber made it into the movie, via talk-show appearances and filmed interviews. Ex-critic Jami Bernard offered up her home movie of being unemployed. Peary wanted to find the tape of Farber interviewing James Stewart at the Telluride Film festival, "but nobody knows where that is." Next up: finding a distributor and clearing his film clips, which if they are not deemed fair use, could cost a fortune.

It's hard not to feel sad at the end of this movie, about a world that no longer exists, a profession that seems to be dying in front of our eyes. Spoutblog's Karina Longworth speaks for the younger generation plying the craft online, but the old culture of literate lengthy debates when movies seemed to really mean something are long gone. "It's a stop the bleeding movie," says Peary. "I hope that those who watch the movie value criticism and will read it and demand it in their newspapers. It's tough though. There are so many factors. What's the effect on people who Twitter all day? That's not good for film criticism."

Here's a transcript of Peary's SXSW critics panel, a Q & A with Peary in Filmmaker, and the trailer:

One of the surprises of the year so far is how well Henry Selick’s 3-D animated gothic fairy tale Coraline lasted at the b.o.; this weekend brings DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens and a spate of 3-D offerings are on the way. Even the venerable Cannes Film Festival, which has made an annual tradition of unveiling the latest animated fare, will for the first time open the 62nd fest on May 13 with not only an animated movie but Disney/Pixar’s 3-D balloon adventure Up, which opens May 29.

Time Magazine talks to 3-D boosters Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Spielberg is collaborating with Peter Jackson on 3-D performance capture movie Tintin. Some industry insiders wonder if Cameron will further delay Avatar's December 19 release date so that more 3-D theaters will be available. EW rounds up the 3D future. UPDATE: The LAT interviews Captain 3-D, Phil McNally.

(EW's list of upcoming 3-D pics is on the jump.)

[Photo courtesy of Time Magazine.]

Back from SXSW, I've been playing catch-up. For much of the news media, Natasha Richardson was the sad, sad story of the week.

Dade Hayes details some of the comings, goings and speculation behind the scenes in the turbulent New York film fest scene, from Tribeca under ex-Sundance chief Geoff Gilmore to Film Society of Lincoln Center honcho Mara Manus, who is giving the musty old place a thorough overhaul.

Kim Masters unveils DreamWorks’ Animation czar Jeffrey Katzenberg’s bad dream.

Business Insider reports Cisco’s acquisition of Flip Cam maker Pure Digital for $590 million. That’s my flip cam! And Business Insider also uses the flip cam in its reporting, grabbing Time EVP John Squires to talk about experimenting with mixing paid and free content. Meanwhile outgoing Time editor Jim Kelly has another POV.

Movie lovers unite! Not only is David Chase bringing a new mini-series to HBO about the early days of Hollywood, A Ribbon of Dreams, but TCM documentaries has greenlit an exhaustive history of Hollywood from the point of the view of the big personalities who built it: Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, produced by John Wilkman with backing from CAA agent-turned-Broadway-impresario Bill Haber.

New Weinstein Co. honcho Tom Ortenberg has scored his first big buy, Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, a UK feature about the early days of Beatle John Lennon. The picture has been filming for about two weeks; Ortenberg and Harvey Weinstein targeted the pic for a pre-buy in Berlin. They see the film as a possible year-end awards contender. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who helped raise him along with his mother Julia. The movie also details young Lennon's close relationship with Quarrymen bandmate Paul McCartney and ends when the early Beatles leave Liverpool for Hamburg, Germany to conquer the world. (I love Malcolm Gladwell's story in The Outliers about how the Beatles put in their 10,000 hours playing long sets in Hamburg.)

"It starts with the script," says Ortenberg, who describes the pic as a "relatable Beatles coming-of-age story about a young boy finding his place in the world, finding his passion, as his mother Julia introduces him to music and guitar when he's 15. There's something in it for everyone."

TWC acquired all rights, U.S., Germany, Latin America. They are planning a year end awards season release with an expansion January. Maple Pictures will release in Canada.

Press release on the jump:

The Los Angeles Film Festival has nabbed producer Rebecca Yeldham as their new fest director. She starts Monday, replacing Rich Raddon, who left the fest three months ago (not because he wasn't doing a good job, but under a cloud of controversy surrounding his financial support of Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban). Filmmaker Bill Condon, even while exec producing this year's Oscar show, lobbied fellow executive board member Yeldham hard to take the job. Here's Indiewire.

Yeldham admits that she resisted at first, wanting to continue her career as an indie producer of such films as Anvil! The Story of Anvil and The Kite Runner and producing partner Walter Salles' upcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. But she began to realize that her own enthusiasm for the prospect of redefining and building a world-class film festival in Los Angeles was taking her over. She decided to take on the annual festival, which takes place this June, while continuing to produce.

Yeldham brings a strong resume to the job. Born in Australia, she worked on the Sundance programming team with then-director Goeff Gilmore and now-director John Cooper from 1997 through 2001, when she left half-way through the year to launch Film Four's American division. She helped Sundance build the World Cinema section with more world premieres, and continued to participate in selection committees and juries at the Indie Spirit Awards, Edinburgh Film Festival and Buenos Aires International Film Festival. Her other credits include Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries and Linha de Passe.

Planning for this summer's 14th LAFF is already well under way under programmers Rachel Rosen and Sean McManus; Yeldham does not expect to make any major changes right away, she says. "I will without question have a role in the program. The team is excellent and doing a great job. We'll see how it shakes out. The definition of the festival and programming agenda will evolve."

Film Independent's Dawn Hudson and Raddon's pursuit of Hollywood studio participation in the LAFF with such films as Universal's Wanted and Hellboy II and Paramount/DreamWorks' Transformers will continue, Yeldham says, citing Wall-E as an example of the sort of studio movie she wants to include. She's already chasing several studio summer releases. "I want this festival to be a destination for great films from all sides of the festival spectrum irrespective of their source," she says. "The lines are blurred about what is independent. Even studio budgets are getting crunched and going after independent financing. In my dream vision of the festival, we could play work of quality that had never been seen before: on a studio, medium or micro budget."

Yeldham kicked the financial tires at LAFF before signing on, so she says the support for the fest, even in uncertain economic times, is "enormous." As the Sundance and Tribeca Festivals go through their own reinvention during a recession, says Yeldham, "This isn't just about the festival world. All industries have to take a breath and look inside their wheelhouse and think about how it's working, if it's working, and cultivate goals about how better to serve their constituents, within the reality of our times."

After its success debuting at SXSW such Judd Apatow projects as Forgetting Sarah Marshall last year and Knocked Up the year before, Universal Pics is taking advantage of the hip SXSW demo --and the fest's pre-summer time-frame--to promo two more flicks. The studio will screen the first-ever footage from Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up to Borat, on 3/15 at 11 PM followed at midnight by Sam Raimi's full-length horror title Drag Me to Hell.

Unusually, however, Universal joined the current Twitter mania and announced Bruno's SXSW footage unveiling via Twitter:

SXSW/Fantastic Festers: First-ever look at BRÜNO footage! Sunday night 11 pm at Alamo Drafthouse Lamar. No badge needed, free admission!

Yes folks, this is the new modern press release, otherwise known as instant viral marketing. Uni PR exec Michael Moses has me on his Twitter feed; since he made this announcement, and others have tweeted a link to him, and then others have seen me on his list of followers, my Twitter followers have skyrocketed. (They have been steadily climbing ever since David Pogue wrote about Twitter in his NYT Circuits column; I wrote a response; I posted my Twitter name akstanwyck; and I figured out how to automatically tweet new blog entries.)

"We're big believers in SXSW as an ignition switch for the right movie," says Moses, who sees Austin, Texas as "a unique city where the counter-culture crosses the mainstream, new media mixes with traditional, and the arts thrive." Attendees at the fest are "a young, movie-loving audience fluent in instant media," he says, "discriminating without being snobbish, [who] can radiate genuine buzz from between the coasts."

Here's one SXSW preview; here's another. Here's The New Yorker's David Denby--a tad late in the day--expounding on the indie movement that has emerged from SXSW: Mumblecore. I'm seeing Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last tonight.

For those of you who are bewildered by the recent Twitter explosion, David Bloom explains it all to you. And Austin American-Statesman Internet editor Robert Quigley uses Twitter to drive traffic.

Here's the Drag Me to hell trailer:

Once in a rare moon you see a film made by a master auteur at the top of his game. At the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day, Mike Leigh and I took the gondola up the mountain to see Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments. We both came out of the theater enthralled, agreeing that it was one of the best films we'd seen in years. It's a crowning achievement. Troell earned four Oscar nominations for his third film, 1971's The Emigrants, starring the young Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow, including Best Picture, followed by its sequel, The New Land. The director is revered in Sweden, where he has worked deliberately in films and television over the decades.

IFC picked up this tough period drama--based on a true story--about a poor, uneducated woman (Maria Heiskanen) with a lunky husband and a large family who learns how to take photographs. Operating his own camera, Troell creates visual poetry. This heartachingly beautiful film opened in limited release Friday.

Here's the review from the LAT's Kenneth Turan, the NYT feature on Troell, and the trailer.

On the media recession front, I learned from Greg Hernandez in the press bleachers at the Oscars that he was losing his job at the Daily News. Well, he wasted no time launching his own blog with a gay celebrity focus, Greg in Hollywood. Here's how he did it--in one week.

It's no shock that after six seasons of programming the Tribeca Film Fest, Peter Scarlet is moving on. Rumors of his exit had started to circulate at the Indie Spirit Awards. And word is Scarlet was getting antsy with Robert DeNiro and partner Jane Rosenthal's push for a smaller, event-oriented festival with less room for esoterica even before he learned that Geoff Gilmore, after 19 years running the higher-profile Sundance Film Festival, was coming in to supervise him. (When he announced the job switch, Gilmore told me that he was planning to let Scarlet run this year's Tribeca festival.) But while Scarlet could have opted to stay on board through this April's fest, which had his fingerprints on it, leaving now is an act of protest indeed.

Now we play a game of musical chairs. With Scarlet leaving, Gilmore will look to install another programmer in his stead. Meanwhile, Gilmore's post at Sundance will need to be filled. The fest has a deep bench of talent. Long-time Gilmore lieutenant John Cooper, who had taken over much of the programming over the past two years, is the presumed heir, but the festival is grabbing an opportunity to take stock of itself and figure out its strategic goals going forward. But it's unlikely that if Cooper doesn't get the job that he would stay.

And at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Rich Raddon vacancy is still open. Film Independent's Dawn Hudson has appointed a search committee, including UTA's Rich Klubeck, WMA's Rena Ronson and attorney Craig Emanuel, to vet potential candidates--and in this crazy economy, there are many. Rachel Rosen is still programming the fest, which has been on an upswing since it centralized itself in Westwood, but the LAFF needs a strong fund-raiser/administrator/director with strong showman skills who can help crystallize the summer fest's identity both inside--and outside--Hollywood.

The film fest at SXSW runs from March 13 to 21; I'll be on the doc jury. And I'll be blogging. Here are the screenings and panels, which include the de rigueur topics these days: The State of Distribution and The Incredible Shrinking Critic.

Conversations at the fest include Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes; indie mogul Bob Berney; IMDb founder Col Needham; and Jan Harlan, Stanley Kubrick's producer and brother-in-law, will share things Kubrick.

Here are trailers for SXSW films Alexander the Last, which will be released via IFC On-Demand at the same time it debuts at the fest, and Troll 2: more are on view at the SXSW YouTube screening room.

Truth is, Geoff Gilmore has been looking to move on from running the Sundance Film Festival for some time. He has been toiling for 19 years in a powerful, influential job--in a non-profit sector. He was at one time attracted to the Warner Independent Pictures gig that went to Mark Gill. The good news with Gilmore's defection March 1 from director of the Sundance Fest to Creative Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, which mounts the Tribeca Film Festival: he's still inside his wheelhouse. He isn't going to pretend to know how to produce or finance movies. But he is excited to be expanding into a bigger arena: New York City. "I've done it for 19 years," says Gilmore on the phone from Dublin. "I'm not sure how much more I could have accomplished. With the problems the film industry faces and what's going on in the independent world, it's the end of a 30-year cycle of growth. There's a distribution bottleneck. It's exciting to me to figure ways to address all that."

Gilmore is trading one movie star boss, Robert Redford, for another, Robert DeNiro. And as Sundance has expanded--and may have peaked--Gilmore now takes on a film fest that has room to mature and grow, having never really found its identity. Could Tribeca give the granddaddy New York Film Fest a run for its money? Peter Scarlet will continue running the 12-day fest, which gets under way April 22. "I think this is a great move for Geoff," said Fox Searchlight's Tony Safford, who preceded Gilmore as Sundance Fest director. "It's a big stage in a big city."

Film Independent's Dawn Hudson agrees that Gilmore can now "play on a very big canvas at Tribeca," she says. "He's such a big thinker and cinephile. He fits into Tribeca's ethos." As for Sundance, the fest has a deep bench, she says. "Over Geoff's time there, he built an institutionalized stable, an ongoing enterprise. There's a deep bench of talent. Sundance is always moving forward. It's good for everybody." Gilmore's long-time lieutenant John Cooper is widely expected to take the Sundance Fest reins.

Also, Gilmore is not just supervising the film fest. He's taking on a larger creative role, building the Tribeca brand. Gilmore has long been excited about the potential for finding a new digital distribution paradigm for indie filmmakers. He likes the idea of getting entrepreneurial, he says, of "seeing how the festival can be transformed into another platform. The independent arena is transforming itself. It's a global enterprise. The innovation comes out of technology that works globally."

Sally Potter's new film Rage stars Jude Law as a transvestite. It screens at the Berlin fest on Sunday. Law is often best when playing down his good looks (I love him in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Road to Perdition) but in this case, Potter writes in her online press notes, the director (Orlando, Yes) took advantage of the actor's beauty:

"Part of the subject matter of Rage is the ugly use of beauty in the pursuit of profit," Potter writes. "Drugged by marketing, sapped by fear of aging, conned by the cult of celebrity -- image becomes all."

"Law, whose beauty has sometimes been held against him as an actor, made the courageous decision to accept the role of Minx -- a 'celebrity super-model' -- and took on a kind of hyper-beauty for this persona...a 'female' beauty which gradually unravels as the story unfolds. Strangely, the more he became a 'she', coiffed and made-up, the more naked was his performance. There was great strength in his willingness to make himself vulnerable. It was an extraordinarily intense part of the shoot."

The SB Independent Audience Choice Award at the Santa Barbara Film Fest went to Skin, which explores a fascinating angle on apartheid. The film, which I saw in Toronto, stars Sam Neill and Alice Krige as white Afrikaner parents under the yoke of South African apartheid who are trying to raise their child (Sophie Okonedo), who is black. The premise of this true story is dramatic: the way the parents handle the issue, believable. The actors are terrific. But Anthony Fabian attacks the material in a straightforward, uninteresting way--which may account for why it has no stateside distributor.

Joe Leydon noticed something funny about Bertrand Tavernier's new movie In the Electric Mist, which is premiering at the upcoming Berlin Film Festival. Stateside, the pic is going straight to DVD. It's a sign of the times when movies with that sort of pedigree can't get a theatrical release.

[Posted by Steve Chagollan]
Having covered a few City of Lights, City of Angels French showcases, I’ve been invited to the occasional lunch at the French Consul General's home in Beverly Hills. One such event last year, for La Vie en Rose Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard, was mobbed by media and industryites. But last Wednesday was more typical of such affairs. Laurent Cantet — director of Cannes Palm d’Or winner The Class, France’s official entry for Academy’s foreign-language competition — was the guest of honor, sitting at the head of an outdoor table lined with few more than a dozen attendees, including the host, David Martinon.

The 46-year-old filmmaker, handsome in an austere way with a head of silvery hair and a no-nonsense air, spoke good English but occasionally relied on an interpreter. We talked about Cantet’s cinema verite methodology on The Class; he workshopped his on actors for a year before shooting began.

Because Cantet has been promoting the film — which covers a year in the life of an inner city junior high school teacher and the relationship with his combative, racially mixed students — practically nonstop since its triumph in Cannes, he shook his head in bewilderment when asked what he was now working on now. He hasn’t had a moment to think about it, much less spend time with his family in Paris.

The film was three years in the making. And despite the fact that he’s used largely non-actor casts in past films — most notably in Human Resources (1999) and slightly less so for his devastating Time Out (2001) and the equally penetrating Heading South (2005), which starred Charlotte Rampling — he says his experience on The Class convinced him that this was the way he wanted to work from now on: unadulterated naturalism from non-pros who are re-enacting everyday situations. The most obvious parallels are the films of Mike Leigh, but Cantet takes it even further, to the point where the camera seems like a fly on the wall.

[Posted by Marc Graser]
It’s a triumph for any brand that can produce a piece of entertainment that doesn’t come across as yet another advertisement that pushes a product on a consumer.

Audi’s been able to do just that with its feature-length documentary Truth in 24, that bowed Thursday night at the AFI Film Festival.

The 100-minute film focuses on the German automaker’s racing team that successfully beat back rival Peugeot this summer to win its eight victory in nine years at Le Mans, easily one of the world’s most grueling auto races, given that it lasts 24 hours. Race was the center of Steve McQueen’s Le Mans, in 1971. Paul Newman’s also placed second in the race.

Now that it’s bowed, Audi is considering theatrical distribution for the pic, as well as a TV partner. It certainly deserves an audience.

That’s because what works is how easily accessible the film makes Le Mans to non-racing fans. Backed by stunning visuals from cinematographer Hank McElwee and narration by Jason Statham (who is turning into a spokesperson for Audi after driving one of its sleek sedans in Transporter 2 and the upcoming third installment), the film skillfully spotlights the personalities of the drivers in the cars. It builds up the drama of the Audi team as the underdogs entering the race to win back their title with an aging car up against menacing looking rockets from their French rival.

In fact, it almost plays out like a football movie, building up a team’s struggle to face all challenges to win the final game (in this case, race) to an exciting climax.

There’s a reason for that.

Co-directors Keith Cossrow and Bennett Viseltear regularly helm docs for NFL Films and the two wanted to create a film for non-gear-heads. It shows.

They also made a film that doesn’t push Audi’s line of vehicles. Sure, Audi’s in the movie. It’s about the company’s racing team, afterall. But outside of the three race cars that blast down the tracks, its regular lineup of cars and SUVs are never seen. Its executives don’t shill or put the brand on a pedestal.

The movie does that subliminally on its own. And not in an off-putting way. There’s no arrogance or attitude. It could have been any car company up on the screen. But because it was Team Audi notching another moment of history in its belt, well, that’s going to give the company a lot of mileage — and the consumer a lot of confidence in its cars when shopping for a new vehicle.

Let the fur fly. In the first review of Doubt, Todd McCarthy is casting seeds of doubt on Meryl Streep's performance.

Like Frost/Nixon, this play-to-screen adaptation is a small-scale period two-hander. The movie enjoyably pits Streep as a tough nun at a Bronx Catholic school against powerful priest Philip Seymour Hoffman. She thinks he's up to no good with a young black student. He thinks she has no basis to prove him wrong. Amy Adams is caught in the middle as a young, trusting nun. The great thing about the play--and the movie--is that we never know for sure who's right. Does the nun have the moral right to act on her instincts that the priest could do the child harm? John Patrick Shanley (who won an Oscar for writing Moonstruck) does a beautiful job of translating his play to the screen.

Oscar-wise, despite McCarthy's concerns about Streep--who definitely adds more nuance and character details to the role as written---the Academy actors should reward Streep for this, and Viola Davis in supporting, for just one bravura scene. With the actors behind it and impeccable production credits the movie is a strong contender, even though it's small, for best picture, adapted screenplay, actress, supporting actress, and music. Here's Pete Hammond.

Doubt's greatest strength is that it invites debate and discussion. I haven't had this much fun arguing about a movie since No Country for Old Men. Almost a year later, my post about that film's pesky ending is still generating comments.

I ran into Steven Soderbergh this weekend at the AFI Fest Che party. He's going to start filming Cleopatra in April. "What's your favorite musical?" I asked him. Pause. He said his inspiration for the 3D musical was Rita Hayworth as Gilda. That's the stylized, ripe tone he's going for, he said. The movie will be shot with with hi-def Red cameras and star as the Egyptian queen Chicago's Catherine Zeta Jones (who worked with Soderbergh on Traffic).

Mark Olsen writes up Che, which Jeff Wells remains ga-ga over. I still think Soderbergh could have wrestled Che into submission at a more audience-friendly length. But all power to him. He's never, ever dull: he just wrapped filming his latest no-budget 2929 movie, The Girlfriend Experience, with porn star Sasha Grey.

Here's a clip from the Che press conference at Toronto.

[Photo of Steven Soderbergh by Jeff Wells]

Needless to say, the AFI Film Fest freaked when Paramount pushed back The Soloist from 2008 release. They figured---rightly--that the movie would be pulled from their opening night. That's not what Paramount wanted, though. The studio thought they could still screen the movie, and hoped that CAA and the filmmakers would see it their way over last weekend. But finally, it's too great a risk to show a movie like The Soloist on October 30 when the movie won't open until March 13. What if, God forbid, it doesn't play? That would be tough to recover from.

So the AFI had a big gaping hole to fill: with celebrity guests. Would Paramount supply one of its movies, moving Defiance up from closing night (would Daniel Craig be here?) or putting up Revolutionary Road or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Would Scott Rudin supply Doubt in place of Revolutionary Road? Would the trades review the movie, whatever it was? AFI promised to alert the media Thursday.

UPDATE: Finally, at 6:30 PM, AFI artistic director Rose Kuo announced the replacement film: Rudin and Miramax came through, with Meryl Streep-starrer Doubt. Happy ending.

Fox Searchlight went from zero to 100 when it took over the release of Danny Boyle’s rags-to-riches romance Slumdog Millionaire (from partner Warner Bros.) just before its launch at September’s Telluride and Toronto Film fests. (Here's an exclusive first look at the official poster.)

The specialty label wasted no time in getting up to speed on Slumdog marketing materials in advance of a November 12 limited opening. They had Boyle, a director who has built a core indie cinephile following, but no name stars. The movie, which is 80 percent English, 20 percent Hindi, is about a teen from the slums of Mumbai, India who answers every question right on India’s “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” The movie is less about how he won—although it answers that question—than why he needed to win. The final answer: Love.

“We do some of our best work under extreme pressure,” says Searchlight COO Nancy Utley. “You have to go with your gut. We tried to capture the spirit of the movie. The upside of the title is it doesn’t seem like anything you’ve ever heard before: it’s a contradiction in itself. We picked up the color palette of the foreign locale, and a beautiful girl, in action."

Searchlight is sending Boyle to spread his Brit charm on a press tour of a dozen American cities through October and November. And Searchlight will do what they did with “Little Miss Sunshine”: wrestle up pre-opening buzz with word-of-mouth screenings, 215 to be exact, in 50 cities. “They’re starting now,” says Utley.

TV spots will take advantage of the movie’s Bollywood soundtrack and closing dance number, and eventually reviews and awards. Natch, Searchlight is supporting an Oscar campaign for the filmmaker—“it’s time,” says Utley—and adapted screenplay writer Simon Beaufoy, who was Oscar-nominated for the label’s The Full Monty. “We always have the little underdog,” says Utley, who’s banking that Slumdog will place favorably against darker, grimmer Oscar competition. “This movie makes you feel good in a time of deepening anxiety.”

UPDATE: As to the controversy about Slumdog's R rating--which Boyle himself is helping to fuel--look at the movie. While it ends up in a good place and is exhilarating to watch, the film puts the viewer through some tough nasty violent real world shit (literally). I spoke to some media folks last night who, while they liked Slumdog, disagreed with its "feel-good" rep. They felt a little beat up along the way. "Definitely an R," said these two parents of a ten-year-old.

Perhaps remembering last year's Oscar campaign for Atonement, which some Oscar-watchers felt peaked too early, Universal is holding back on Frost/Nixon, which is perceived by many to be 2008's Oscar front-runner. But suddenly Universal's slow-burn Oscar campaign is at the mercy of the London film critics. Spread at click-speed, the first London Film Festival review by The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw happened to be negative. Stateside trade reviews proved more positive. And many bloggers were pissed that they hadn't yet been invited to see the movie.

Here's a sampling of LFF reviews:

The London Times

Empire

This is London

The Independent.

The James Bond movie Quantum of Solace is reviewed in London as well:

The Independent's Geoffrey McNab wants more "humour."
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says it's "a crash-bang Bond."
The Times' James Christopher says villain Mathieu Amalric has a "wormy arrogance"

After the frenetic fest circuit, I've been screening up a storm lately. I finally caught up with a couple of pics I missed in Sundance and Toronto:

Ballast: Sundance critics raved about this small-scale indie, which was initially picked up by IFC, but director Lance Hammer decided to self-release the pic. Beautifully framed and shot in North Carolina, the drama explores the aftermath of a suicide on a dysfunctional, poverty-stricken extended family who painstakingly figure out that they need each other to survive. But the actors, while authentic, are extremely inexpressive, which flattens the experience. The movie opened in NYC October 1, and will hit L.A. on November 7. Here's Manohla Dargis's review. And the trailer.

Choke: Greencine rounds up coverage of Choke, adapted by actor-director Clark Gregg from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, which opened this weekend to mixed reviews. Here's a report from the set and Mark Olsen's LAT feature on Gregg, who is funny in a supporting role. This is by far Sam Rockwell's best role to date. He's sometimes willing to make his characters too dark and off-putting. Not so here.

His compulsive sex addict is dealing with his dying, wacky mom (Anjelica Huston) and lusting after every woman in sight except the one he really likes (Kelly Macdonald), and yet he is charming and winning. (Not that we care what they think, but the Two Bens on At the Movies both hated it.) This is the kind of archly comedic movie that could easily lose its bearings and be a disaster. Gregg nails it. But catch Choke soon, it won't be around long.

Every fall the good old New York Film Fest, which opens September 26, gets the same scrutiny. It's like an annual ritual. Some journalist asks, is it still relevant? does it only appeal to old people? And someone else, in this case The Reeler, defends it as an institution for the ages.

This year, even if the pickings were slim among higher-profile American pictures, I particularly commend Telluride and New York (Toronto plays a different kind of game) for sticking to the best that world cinema had to offer. New York has always kept arcane art films at the core of its selection of some two dozen films, and often chooses controversial and unpopular pics, such as last year's Brian DePalma Iraq flick Redacted.

More than Cannes, which tends to stick to name auteurs and only rarely anoints new members to the club, the NYFF has always been brave about its choices. Even the erudite programmers at Telluride this year hadn't heard of some of NY's picks. These days festivals are supposed to challenge audiences. That's their job.

Scott Kirsner posits a new role for film fests in this Businessweek story on Innovation Lessons from Hollywood, complete with an 18 People Who Changed Hollywood slide show.

Filmmaker magazine posts Jamie Stuart's NYFF 46 teaser and Spoutblog's Karina Longworth adds analysis of his series of NYFF shorts over the years.

[Photos: NYFF's Wendy and Lucy and Hunger]

After Telluride, Toronto and a taste of NYFF press screenings here in New York, as this cartoon suggests, I'm ready to go home.

The packed Walter Reade press screening of NYFF opener Laurent Cantet's The Class, which won the Palme d'Or, played a little flatter than I expected. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing. (How many times is Patrick Goldstein going to write about Michael Barker and Tom Bernard out of Toronto? I don't disagree with his take on them; it's just that he's written the same story before.)

The Class is terrific three-camera cinema verite that combines some of Mike Leigh's advance improv prep methods with throwing a real teacher (Francois Begaudeau, author of the book Entre les Murs) into a situation with real kids and seeing what high energy results. Cantet directed the action and asked for certain beats and content. He wanted an energetic first take, and then worked on the scene going forward, but he says much of the subsequent "acting" was as good as the first take.

The ping-pong ball interaction between the teacher and the kids is infuriating and exhilarating. Cantet has points he wants to make--so the film is a tad didactic. But the movie leaves wriggle room in terms of what's at stake and who's right or wrong. It rings true. All too true.

I saw Gary Giddins, David Edelstein, Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell, David D'Arcy, Bill Wolf, Kathleen Carroll, Jamie Stuart, and sat next to a young guy who runs a site called nycmovieguru who ranks films on the Wizard of Oz scale: heart, brains and courage. On that basis The Class gets a 7, 9 and 9 out of ten from me. Pas mal.

There's too much going on here. Lots to see, too little time.

This morning I went to the basement Silver Screening Room at the new ultra-ritzy Hazelton Hotel to catch the Coens' Burn After Reading. It's a wicked, nasty, arch, funny piece of work, very Coens, well-acted by Frances McDormand, who as usual provides warmth to what is a freezing cold view of the world. George Clooney's performance as a womanizer who happily cheats on his wife with Tilda Swinton, McDormand and anyone else who will open their legs is tinged with real sadness. And Richard Jenkins and a host of other supporting players are excellent, as usual. Brad Pitt is hilarious as a bumbling, cheery fitness instructor who tries to extort money out of CIA operative John Malkovich, with unfortunate, messy results.

What's the problem? The movie has chuckles, but people you care about--and others you don't--keep getting bumped off unexpectedly. This is not a light romp. It's fierce.

Heading to Toronto, movies are seeking a fall media platform, or Oscar credibility, or a distributor, or both. The Toronto Star polled attending media on their best picks. There's plenty of info out there to help make choices among the hundreds of pics on display, especially from the key fests Cannes, Venice and Telluride. Here's a Guide.

Cannes Must-Sees:
Steve McQueen's The Hunger (IFC) is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful.
Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (SPC) is the first animated feature doc.
Kim Jee-Woon's The Good, The Bad and the Weird (IFC) is a kimchi western homage to Sergio Leone.
Steven Soderbergh's Che is shorter by 17 minutes (about four hours) and will soon land a distrib.
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, starring Michelle Williams as a vulnerable woman on the road who loses her best pal, her dog Lucy, is being released by Oscilloscope.
Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, is an ingenious ensemble puzzle starring the always riveting Philip Seymour Kaufman.

Venice Info:
Two films heading from Venice to Toronto are a tad tarnished by mixed reviews. Former Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu writing partner Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain was financed by 2929 Entertainment and is seeking a distrib. Variety's review reveals that Babel writer Arriaga is very much a rookie director. Here are different takes from the UK's Guardian and Telegraph. UPDATE: And Time's Richard Corliss drops the Oscar word.

The Coens' much-anticipated follow-up to No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, is also so far not getting raves. But it's still at the top of my must-see list, and could well be commercial. Here's Variety's review. And the NYT profiles the Coens.

Telluride Must-Sees:
Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments, which Sony Pictures Classics will acquire, if I know Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, before it gets to Toronto is being chased by several art-house distribs. There's an international version that is 21 minutes shorter, but I would vote for every second of the movie I saw, which is one of the best films I have seen in a very long time. It's a masterpiece.
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire will be a huge hit across all audiences (Searchlight).
Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky stars the winning Sally Hawkins, who does irritate some people. (Miramax)
Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long stars Kristin Scott Thomas in a makeup-free, tour-de-force performance, in French. (SPC)
Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, starring Jeff Goldblum in the role of a lifetime, is seeking a buyer. UPDATE: Here's Todd McCarthy's review.

Lots of other pics are getting screened beforehand. Toronto critic Peter Howell got a gander at an early screening of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. UPDATE: Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married is a return to form for some, an annoying version of Margot at the Wedding for others. (As someone who liked Margot at the Wedding, I'm somewhere in the middle; the acting is superb.) I've spoken to two people I trust who have seen Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler; it appears that my hunch that Mickey Rourke will be in the running for award season kudos was correct.

One of the tricks of the fall film fest trade is to launch a few movies that will gain awards season traction. Telluride has often done well picking some of these pics in advance, such as Brokeback Mountain, Walk the Line and last year's Juno. So given this year's short supply of completed specialty division fare, as many distribs have opted to take the late-year approach to chasing Oscar, Telluride dug up its own indie and foreign gems to help them get some attention.

What these films desperately need is good reviews and buzz.

One unfinished big-studio film came to Telluride anyway. David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button played well in the Opera House with the folks who actually saw it, but risked the Wrath of the Internet--bloggers reviewed the tantalizing 20-minute assemblage (edited by Fincher's editor, Kirk Baxter), which could hardly be reviewed as a real movie, including one blogger who hadn't even seen it. (On the other end of the time continuum, GQ sent a writer here who is prepping a 6000-word Fincher profile.)

What worked for Paul Thomas Anderson the year before seemed to backfire this time. For one thing, unpredictably, there were more bloggers and fan sites covering the fest this year. This instant reaction from Slashfilm gives a sense of how the blogosphere can weigh in on a movie. Fincher couldn't show one long sequence--the usual practice-- because he needed to show the passage of time and the different faces of Button (Brad Pitt), so the concept of the movie would be clear. (Telluride wanted fewer, longer clips, but didn't get them until the eve of the showing.)

The other difference between Button and There Will Be Blood is the difference between a Paramount Vantage indie directed by PTA and a big studio director who has commandeered a major movie star and $150-million in big-Paramount resources. Insiders can't help but speculate on the eventual outcome of the movie. Will it get good reviews and be an Oscar contender? Will it lose a fortune? (Is it Memoirs of a Geisha all over again?) The real folks in Telluride will spread good word in their communities, which was Paramount's intention here. But the fanboys are interested in this movie too, and it may not be for them.

No matter how the film turns out, the buzz on Brad Pitt--who was impressive in the Fincher Tribute scenes from Seven and Fight Club-- is getting louder. It could be his turn.

Among the relative unknown pics with Oscar hopes on their sleeves are Flash of Genius, a heart-tugging David-and-Goliath story starring Greg Kinnear in a moving performance as the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper who takes on Ford and loses everything in the process. Universal backed this deliberately old-fashioned drama from producer-turned-director Marc Abraham (Children of Men, The Family Man). Kinnear was nominated for As Good as it Gets, so he's in the Oscar zone. But while he and Lauren Graham give their all, the tearkjerker has not built much momentum here, and even with mighty Universal behind it, will need great reviews to get anywhere.

Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky comes out of Telluride with some heat for actress Sally Hawkins, yet another relative British unknown like Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton, who went on to win an Oscar nomination (along with Leigh for writer and director). Leigh insists on picking his own actors and says he will never ever succumb to pressure to hire anyone, much less an American star. (He desperately wants to make his biopic on the great Romantic painter Turner, but no one will fund it.) Miramax is releasing.

Leigh also held his own on Friday's Director/Actors panel, moderated by Annette Insdorf--and went up against Fincher, insisting that although they work with actors entirely differently and with an enormous budget differential, they're actually after the same thing: creating authentic characters. Here's a video snippet featuring Fincher.

A movie that does not have a distrib is Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, which stars Jeff Goldblum in an astonishing role as a Berlin cabaret performer who survived a concentration camp by playing a dog for a commandant (Willem Dafoe). The movie is magical, fictional and outrageous, like the popular Yoram Kaniuk novel it is based on, and marks a feat of daring on the part of Schrader and Goldblum. Some small distrib will figure out that there is a long-shot Oscar play here for Goldblum, who uses every skill he ever learned in his career for this juicy sexy crazy role.

UPDATE: Another possible awards contender is Brit actress Kristin Scott Thomas, star of French novelist Philippe Claudel's intense two-hander I've Loved You So Long, his directorial debut. Thomas plays a mysterious woman who comes to live with her younger sister (an impeccable Elsa Zylberstein). Slowly we begin to learn the details: the elder sister has been in prison for fifteen years, and is shut down. Slowly, she begins to wake up to the family around her, two little nieces, her sister, husband, and her father-in-law. She starts to talk. Gets a job. Engages with her sister about what happened. While Claudel started out wanting to explore his experience teaching in prison, this story of two sisters emerged. Thomas has lived in France for 25 years, but this is her first role carrying a French movie. Sony Pictures Classics is also taking this to Toronto. France has a plethora of films for possible Oscar submission this year, led by Palme d'Or winner The Class (which opens the NYFF). But if the actress field is open enough, Thomas could sneak in. This is more than just an accent or a beautiful woman made plain.

Here's Kim Voynar's Cinematical review.

The discovery of the fest for Leigh, me and many others was Swedish auteur Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments, which is based on a true story of a downtrodden turn-of-the-century woman who learns to use a camera. Silent images convey much of the story, and the photography and detail of daily life are stunning. So is the performance of Maria Heiskanen as the mother of an ever-increasing brood who finds joy in observing the world around her through a camera lens, just as Troell does. He has been making films in Sweden for more than 40 years (as well as a few Hollywood pics such as Zandy's Bride). He was Oscar-nominated for writing and directing 1973's foreign Oscar winner The Emigrants. Thanks to Telluride's cajoling, Troell, 77, came to the fest to accept a silver medallion and brought his spanking new film, which will now go to Toronto to seek a North American distrib. It will open in Sweden in September; it is a strong candidate foreign Oscar submission. Todd McCarthy also raves in his Telluride Wrap.

More anon. Here are my interviews with Hunger's Steve McQueen and Danny Boyle, whose Slumdog Millionaire is the breakout hit of the festival. Here's Todd McCarthy's review.

UPDATE: The irony is that by shutting down Warner Independent, Warner Bros. gave away the biggest hit they might have had; nonetheless sharing the release with Fox Searchlight is smart because big Warner would have had no clue what to do with it. The movie is brilliantly structured and executed; a thrill ride inside the bustling world of Mumbai. As the 18-year-old Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant answers each question, the movie flashes back to his life to show how he learned the answer. The movie is painful and sordid, exhilarating and joyous. Will it go all the way? To a smash hit, yes. Then you think: cinematography, writing, directing, editing, score...and yes, there's a Bollywood musical number under the closing credits.

[Actor-director panel participants from left, Greg Kinnear, Mike Leigh, Elsa Zylberstein, moderator Annette Insdorf, David Fincher, Jean Simmons and Jeff Goldblum; Danny Boyle, bottom.]

More Telluride photos on the jump.

French film funder and seller Wild Bunch is finalizing its North American distrib deal on Steven Soderbergh's Che, Wild Bunch's Vincent Maraval told Screen at the Venice fest (I hear it's 2929's Magnolia):

"The film has been done to be exploited in two parts. We did that screening of the two films together only for Cannes. The idea is to release them separately. But Steven would like for the US to have a small exploitation of the film as one film," Maraval said.

It now looks likely that the long version of Che that screened in Cannes will initially be road-showed in the US, although it remains to be seen how wide this release will be. "My position is to do two cities maximum. The position of the distributor and Steven is to do many more cities."

The company is debuting Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler late in Venice, concurrent with Toronto, because they're waiting for Bruce Springsteen to finish his song for the movie's credits. UPDATE: Slashfilm tracked down Aronofsky's blog.

Wild Bunch expects to sell The Wrestler at Toronto. It will also close the New York Fest.

The first day of the 35th Telluride Film Festival started off hot and dry at the annual patron's brunch up the mountain. Tributee Jean Simmons sat under a melon-colored hat and blue umbrella, charming eager listeners, still beautiful. She remembered her then-husband, director Richard Brooks, telling Burt Lancaster during the filming of Elmer Gantry, "More teeth!" "Burt worked out on a trapeze every morning," Simmons said.

The Brits sat at one table, chowing down on eggs and chanterelles: Miramax's Daniel Battsek, Happy-Go-Lucky director Mike Leigh, and Hunger director Steve McQueen. Like Cannes, IFC's Jonathan Sehring and Sony's Michael Barker and Tom Bernard (pictured with Fest co-director Gary Meyer and critics Scott Foundas and Todd McCarthy) seem to be most aggressively tracking possible pick-ups.

Tracy Chapman and sister Aneta were among the patrons who came "for fun, just to see movies, not working," said Chapman.

At the Sheridan Opera House that night, doc filmmaker Ken Burns, at Telluride for his 19th straight year, welcomed the crowd with: "Can we have a good film fest?"

"Yes, we can," they crowed.

After an impressive montage of commercials and music videos of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Iggy Pop and others, plus clips of Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac, Todd McCarthy did an in-depth career interview with Fincher. (More of that conversation later.)

Then the crowd watched 20 minutes of artfully edited fragments of the $150 million The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, adapted by Eric Roth from a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Newborn Benjamin Button is named by a young black woman (Taraji P. Henson) in post-World War I New Orleans after his mother dies giving birth and his father, horrified by his wizened appearance, drops him on the doorstep of an old folks home.

Taking full advantage of his ILM background, Fincher takes Button (Brad Pitt) from a tiny baby with the body of an old arthritic man through younger and more robust incarnations as he ages. He serves as a merchant seaman and in one epic sequence, runs into the deadly aftermath of a WWII attack by a submarine on a warship. Button eventually catches up with love interests Cate Blanchett, who tries to seduce him by dancing for him, and Tilda Swinton, who feeds him caviar and vodka. The movie is gorgeously mounted in minute period detail, complete with swooping crane shots and intricate camera moves. Produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall (pictured here at the Sheridan Opera House with Fincher), Button has a burnished sepia polish.

According to Paramount production exec Brad Weston, the movie has been cut by another five minutes down to "a little over two and half hours," he said. It's about to be locked. After years of stalled development the movie was greenlit by new Paramount chief Brad Grey after previous management teams had balked at its cost, revived because Grey was looking for a vehicle for Brad Pitt. Fincher, who has given Pitt some of his juiciest roles, had just the thing. The movie could go either way--toward Oscar season glory or inflated noble failure. That's the risk everyone takes with an all-in bet like this. Certainly there's never been anything like it.

IndieWire's Eugene Hernandez, Spout's Karina Longworth and I jammed into the tiny Back Lot to see Prodigal Sons, which San Francisco critic David Thomson had promoted so enticingly in the program. (Here's his Guardian write-up.) Faced with the prospect of returning to her 20th high school reunion in Helena, Montana, Kimberly Reed enlisted a cinematographer pal to help her document a complicated set of issues. She had been the popular high school football star Paul, and now she was transexual Kim, with her girlfriend Claire in tow. Clearly, she and her older brother Marc, who was adopted nine months before she was born, never got along. The movie unflinchingly shows the mentally unstable Marc trying not only to cope, after ten years estrangement, with his brother's sex change into a sister, but the news that his birth mother was the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Oddly, Marc was interviewed for another doc "Searching for Orson," while this film was being made.

Reed tries to weave her story, her brother's story, and their dramatic family conflict into a coherent documentary, but in this case a more experienced filmmaker/outsider might have been better suited to shape this mother lode of material. "It was very turbulent to have that camera presence there," she admitted at the Q & A. "Our family was off and running with the drama we were often engaged in." UPDATE: Todd McCarthy's review.

Mike Jones and I winged from LAX to Montrose, Colorado on the packed Telluride Film Fest charter, which always yields good advance info. From there a shuttle bus through the glorious Rockies brought us to Telluride.

For one thing, producer-turned-director Marc Abrahams (Children of Men) was on the plane, along with stars Greg Kinnear and Lauren Graham, which meant that one of the to-be-announced sneaks at the fest is Flash of Genius, a straight-ahead well-acted four-hankie drama about a guy who invents the intermittent windshield wiper and refuses to back down in his fight against The Man, in this case, Detroit's big car companies. Universal is releasing.

Distrib veteran M.J. Peckos is debuting American Violet, directed by Walt Disney's great-nephew, Tim Disney and starring Alfre Woodard.

Irish film Kisses (left), which was well-reviewed out of Galway and Locarno, is bound for Toronto, where CAA hopes to find a North American buyer (Focus Features has foreign). Distribs like IFC and SPC have seen a rough version of the film; it will screen here without subtitles (due to thick brogues) but will boast titles in Toronto.

Indian actress-turned-director Nandita Das is giving Firaaq a "gentle tryout before Toronto," she says. She's selling it herself. Writer Salman Rushdie is here to offer support, even though he has nothing to do with the movie.

IFC has scooped up Telluride and Toronto title Flame & Citron.

Perusing the program, which was handed out to everyone on the plane, I wasn't the only one interested in a doc called Prodigal Sons, directed by Kimberly Reed, who grew up as Paul, the brother of Marc, who was adopted. After a tendentious youth--she was the good boy, while Marc was the black sheep-- and an estrangement of 10 years, they confront their relationship. And Marc reveals that he has discovered that he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Yikes.

On the plane I sat next to LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas--who files for all 16 of New Times' alternative weeklies. He and Variety's Todd McCarthy are each doing a Q & A with director David Fincher, who will unspool almost 20 minutes of footage from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a Brad Pitt movie with a two hour 43 minute running time at last count and a high budget estimated at some $180 million. Hard to believe. The studio's says it's $150 million. Can't wait to see the footage. Paramount's new marketing co-prexy Megan Colligan arranged Fincher's debut here, after last year's similar screening of There Will be Blood footage went so well.

McCarthy says there are 14 films to review here. Wow.