Paul Giamatti & Director Phil Morrison Talk All Is Bright, Paul Rudd & More

In All is Bright, Paul Giamatti and Paul Rudd play two Canadian former partners in crime who travel to New York to try and sell Christmas trees (“try” being the operative word). Giamatti is Dennis, who, out on parole after four years in the clink, finds out that his daughter think he’s dead and his wife is romantically involved with Rene, played by Rudd. Directed by Phil Morrison (Junebug,) the comedy also features the inimitable Sally Hawkins as a Russian immigrant who befriends Dennis.

51st New York Film Festival: Watching Film’s Future at the Shorts Program

Countless legendary film careers began with short films. This is one reason every major film festival, from Cannes to Toronto to New York, showcases short films—these same filmmakers often end up returning with their features a few years later (sometimes extended versions of those shorts), having used their short as a launching pad for successful careers. Martin Scorsese might have gotten onto the map with Mean Streets, but it was his 1963 short What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This,

Transformations: Matthew McConaughey & Jared Leto on Dallas Buyers Club

If the adage that dramatic weight loss or gain is the key to Oscar glory, then Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto are shoo-ins this year. Both transformed their bodies to play characters battling AIDS at the height of the epidemic in Dallas Buyers Club. But there’s a whole lot more to their performances than just the physical changes they submitted their bodies to—the transformations helped each actor achieve a near spiritual connection to characters rarely seen in mainstream films.

Chatting With Director Jim Mickle of We Are What We Are

For a key scene in the new drama We Are What We Are (opened Sept. 27), director/co-writer/editor Jim Mickle found himself up a creek holding a pile of bones.

“At some point, I think it was myself, it was a bunch of PAs, it was the prop gang, it was the art department, everyone had a stack of bones and they were just upcreek, just throwing it into the water,”

A Visual Guide to the 51st New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival was created in 1963 at the Lincoln Center as the non-competitive "festival of festivals." As Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote, "it was a time when the medium was still struggling to be taken seriously as an art form. Lincoln Center's own chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, thought the event had no business being there, protesting, 'Movies are like baseball.' " Film no longer has that problem,

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 & 7 Delicious Food Films

You might find it odd to begin a brief glimpse into some amazing films about, or crucially influenced by, food by starting with an animated film for children. But you’d be forgetting that one of the great food films of this age, or any other, was Pixar’s Ratatouille.

Sony Pictures' Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 premise is almost The Island of Dr. Moreau-esque—inventor Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) finds out that his infamous water-into-food invention survived his attempt to destroy it,

Director Steve McQueen & his Actors Open up About 12 Years a Slave

There’s a reason they call it buzz. The electricity was visceral in the theaters as the lights came up. The after-shocks spread into the rooms where interviews took place. The reaction 12 Years a Slave elicited at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)—stunned silence, shock, applause, was monumental. And just like that, British director Steve McQueen’s harrowing drama established itself as the Oscar front-runner, even before it won the fest’s top prize.

The film is based on the 1853 autobiography by Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor),

An Evening With Haifaa Al Mansour, Writer/Director of the Historic Wadjda

There have been many objects of fascination that have been a crucial part of great films. Think of the Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story, or, to use an even more famous example, Rosebud from Citizen Kane. In Haifaa Al Mansour’s fantastic, ground-breaking Wadjda (the first feature length film to be shot entirely in the Kingdom), the object is a beautiful green bicycle.

The Future of Film, Television (& More): 5 New Mind Blowing Technologies

There are so many scintillating technologies in the works one imagines looking back on James Cameron’s Avatar as almost quaint. As absurd as that sounds, looking around the technology space is like looking into a future that would have seemed nearly impossibly only a decade ago. With the truly mind blowing speed with which the internet, smart phones and digital cameras have increased in functionality and ubiquity, so to has the ways in which you can shoot,

Building the Perfect Engine: The Filmmakers Behind Universal’s Rush

Ron Howard’s Rush hits theaters September 20, and early reviews are hailing it as one of the greatest racing movies of all time. Centered on the intense, often brutal rivalry between Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) during the 1976 Formula 1 season, Rush itself was built with the scrutiny and care of a great race car team. Once Peter Morgan's script made the rounds, an incredible team of filmmakers was assembled to create one of the year's most exciting films,

Jake Gyllenhaal & Director Denis Villeneuve on Prisoners & Enemy

Scorsese has De Niro and DiCaprio. Steve McQueen has Michael Fassbender. Nicole Holofcener has Catherine Keener. Now Denis Villeneuve, whose 2010 Incendies earned a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination, also has a muse: Jake Gyllenhaal. The actor teamed with the French Canadian director in two films that sparked plenty of buzz earlier this month when they screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The higher profile of their one-two punch is the thriller Prisoners,

Director David Twohy on how he Crafted the Riddick Trilogy’s Exoplanets

The basic premise behind each installment of writer and director David Twohy’s sci-fi film trilogy—Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick—is pretty straightforward. Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, finds himself on a hostile alien planet inhabited by creatures that want to kill him. To add flare to what otherwise could become a tired storyline, Twohy constructs his films around dramatic human storylines and builds them up from a foundation of real-world science.

Could This Fall be the Best Film Season in Years?

There are major themes being explored in film in the coming months, in what looks to be a diverse and deeply challenging (in a good way) season of releases. Just going by the excitement of audiences at TIFF, there is reason to hope that we’re looking at one of the most quality-packed stretches in recent cinematic memory.

The plots are diverse, the casts are a mix of globally renown stars and newcomers, but the themes are universal.

Talking With Legendary Director William Friedkin

William Friedkin, legendary director of The French Connection (1971), which won him the Best Director Oscar, and The Exorcist (1973), one of the greatest horror films of all time, recently published his memoirs, The Friedkin Connection, a candid look at his early life and his long movie career.

We caught up with him as he was touring the country to promote his book,

Creativity in Hollywood: Film Visionaries On Creative Process And Inspiration

Unlike most films and television shows, inspiration is not available on-demand. In the highly creative realm of movie-making, a good idea can catapult careers, spark motion picture franchises, and make cinematic history.

Inventing the next film can mean laying the groundwork for brilliant movies and television, from Inception, Taxi Driver, The Master, or Edward Scissorhands.

Of course, caveats abound.

The World’s End: What’s Behind our Apocalypse Obsession?

Edgar Wright’s The World’s End (premiering August 23) is not the first, second, third or fourth film to come out this year about an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic world. A cursory glance of 2013's film slate would suggest we are currently suffering from a collective panic attack about our prospects on the planet. This is the End, World War Z,

George Mastras on Writing & Directing One of Breaking Bad’s Best Episodes

George Mastras has been a criminal investigator for the public defender’s office in Washington D.C., a counselor at a juvenile correctional facility during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, a litigator in New York, and a defense attorney in Los Angeles. Then he quit, bought a one-way ticket to China and backpacked around the world for two years. He wrote a novel while he was in Indonesia that was published by Scribner in early 2009 to very good reviews.

An Evening With Filmmaking Icon Norman Jewison

Lauded filmmaker Norman Jewison may be as entertaining a storyteller in person as he is through film. Rocking New Balance sneakers, sunglasses and youthful exuberance at a July 22 event at the MPAA in Washington, D.C., the 87-year-old filmmaker regaled a delighted audience with tales from his more than four decades of historic success in the industry.

Jewison boasts a repertoire of films that have amassed a remarkable total of 46 Oscar nominations and 12 Oscar Awards.

Workaholic Woody Allen: Five Decades & Counting of Unparalleled Production

In 1966, China became the first nation to synthesize Insulin, Walt Disney died, the first Star Trek episode “The Man Trap” aired, England won the World Cup (they haven’t won one since), and a young director by the name of Woody Allen released his first feature film, What’s Up Tiger Lily?

In the 47-years that have followed, Allen has essentially made a movie a year. He came along right when a slew of young directors were on the make—Steven Spielberg,

Talking With DP Jonathan Ingalls About Killer Whale Documentary Blackfish

For the past 10 years, producer, director, and cinematographer Jonathan Ingalls has been making compelling documentary television (MTV’s I Used to be Fat, A&E’s The First 48 and films such as  City Lax: An Urban Lacrosse Story.) This week, perhaps his most controversial project, Blackfish, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles, after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in January and making a giant splash.