Director Ritesh Batra on his Mumbai Set Love Story The Lunchbox

Writer/director Ritesh Batra is enjoying critical and viewer acclaim for his first feature-length film, The Lunchbox. The film, set in Mumbai, is a quiet love story that takes place mostly through hand-written letters. So it’s a surprise to find the Indian-born director and his film at the center of a fiery controversy over the current role and power of the Film Federation of India.

But the decision late last year by India’s official film body to select a lesser-known film with limited distribution,

How The Lego Movie Got Its Stop-Motion Look

When the trailer for The Lego Movie came out, the Internet was abuzz. The Lego characters had that signature stop-motion feel to them, moving in a slightly stilted manner. Was the movie filmed in stop-motion or CG animation? “There were a couple arguments that we all found quite humorous when we first put out the trailers. People on the Internet were saying they knew for a fact we were doing stop-motion,”

The Monuments Men Production Designer Jim Bissell Re-Creates a Ruined Europe

In The Monuments Men, art experts weave through battlefields and behind enemy lines in order to find art looted by the Nazis. Before he was a dictator, Adolf Hitler was an art student, and he planned to take the best art from the countries he conquered and assemble it in a museum that would rival the Louvre in Paris. It was the act of a lunatic, and The Monuments Men had to capture that scope.

Director Jehane Noujaim on her Oscar Nominated Doc The Square

An Oscar nomination can vault a young filmmaker into the big leagues. But for Jehane Noujaim, director of The Square, it means that her film might have the chance to be seen by many of the people who made it. The Square, a powerful, on-the-ground look at Egypt’s revolutionary uprising, was shot by Noujaim and a largely Egyptian crew on the volatile streets in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square for more than two years.

Sonic Manipulation: Deborah Stratman on her Foley Artist Doc Hacked Circuit

Hearing is believing—this is one of the points Debroah Stratman makes with her fantastic short film about foley artists, Hacked Circuit. While we often associate our eyes as the prime mover in our emotions when we watch a film, it’s our ears, Stratman argues, that moves us to really feel.

Stratman has made some very intriguing documentaries in her career. Hacked Circuit is her 28th film, her third at Sundance Film Festival.

Ilan Gabai, FX Technical Director of Rio 2, Talks Digital Wonders

Typically, the job of digital effects animator does not require previous experience working with live explosives. But it certainly looks good on a résumé.

Ilan Gabai, an effects technical director (FX TD) with Blue Sky Studios, can claim that experience. The 33-year-old grew up in Israel and served three years in his country’s defense forces where he handled grenades, mortars, and RPGs. “I got to blow up a lot of things during my training,”

Sundance: Getting Low Down With John Hawkes & Elle Fanning

Elle Fanning is fantastic in Low Down, a film filled with superb actors. Fanning holds the center of a film as loose and atmospheric as the music it portrays, playing Amy-Jo Albany, the daughter of the brilliant, smack addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (one of the best character actors in the business, John Hawkes.) It’s a beautifully shot film by experimental filmmaker and cinematographer Jeff Preiss about a perfectly ugly situation.

Novelist Joyce Maynard on Jason Reitman’s Adaptation of her Labor Day

Joyce Maynard is a rarity in the movie world: a writer who’s thrilled with the film adaptation of her novel. Maynard’s “Labor Day” was adapted for the screen and directed by Jason Reitman. It’s about a reclusive single mother (Kate Winslet), her 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) and the escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who hides out in their rundown New England house and creates, at least for a long weekend, an unorthodox family that fill a need in all three people.

Writer/Director John Slattery on Scouting, Casting & Shooting God’s Pocket

If you’re going to peel yourself out of bed at the crack of dawn to attend a screening, it might as well be of John Slattery’s feature length directorial debut, God’s Pocket. Adapted from the novel by Peter Dexter, Slattery has recruited fellow Mad Men star Christina Hendricks as Jeannie Scarpano, and a slew of heavyweight male actors to inhabit the insular, violent, and often very funny world of the titular South Philadelphia neighborhood where the film is set.

Sundance: Film Scholar Noah Isenberg on One of 1st Indie Filmmakers, Edgar G. Ulmer

Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenberg’s new book: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker At The Margins. Ulmer was ambitious, and a teller of tall tales about his career: it might never be possible to untangle fact from fiction on his early years in Vienna and (maybe) Berlin.

Sundance: Kristen Wiig & Bill Hader Dig Deep in Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins

You go in to The Skeleton Twins expecting to laugh because it stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, and you do, you laugh quite a lot. But then you end up feeling almost blindsided by this bracing look at adult lives gone horribly awry, a story of estranged two siblings who have been so thoroughly messed up from the suicide of their father and their own failed lives. Craig Johnson has created something remarkable here,

Sundance: Trouble in Texas in Jim Mickle’s Thrilling Cold in July

Director Jim Mickle is back at Sundance for a second year in a row with the dark, thrilling Cold in July, based on the novel by Joe R. Landale. After serving up last year’s compelling cannibal family film We Are What We Are, Mickle seems right at home in this neo-noir set in a small Texas town sometime in the 1980s.

Cold in July wastes no time plunging you into an ordinary man’s extraordinary dilemma.

Sundance: Steve James’s Doc Life Itself Captures Spirit of Roger Ebert

For half of the history of cinema, Roger Ebert has been writing about film. This point is made by Richard Corliss, the Film Comment critic, who wrote the infamous piece “All Thumbs,” arguing that the Siskel & Ebert show, along with the rising culture of 'rating' movies with letter grades or thumbs, was damaging true film criticism. That this same man is such a big presence in James' documentary tells you that the scope of the subject's career is too big,

Sundance: Aubrey Plaza’s Deadly Turn in Life After Beth

Last year we interviewed Jeff Levine, the director of Warm Bodies, a zom-rom-com (excuse us) about a young woman and the zombie she falls for. The premise was fresh and the execution commendable. Julie (Teresa Palmer) finds herself falling for R (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie who still seems to retain some flicker of his sweet human soul.

In writer/director Jeff Baena’s directorial debut, Life After Beth, that premised is tweaked slightly,

Sundance: Jenny Slate Charms in Writer/Director Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child

Gillian Robespierre’s first crack at Obvious Child was as a short that she filmed in the winter of 2009. “We were frustrated by the limited representations of young women’s experience with pregnancy, let alone growing up,” she wrote on her Kickstarter page. “We were waiting to see a more honest film, or at least, a story that was closer to many of the stories we knew.” The short starred comedian Jenny Slate, the ex-SNL cast member (who infamously dropped the f-bomb on her very first show),

Sundance: Macon Blair’s Melancholy Assassin in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin

Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin was a hell of a way to spend an afternoon in the theater here at Sundance. Saulnier’s film is a revenge story marked not by the mindless pursuit of retribution but rather a sad, resigned commitment to a dark task. Our protagonist, Dwight (Macon Blair, outstanding), openly acknowledges the pointlessness of his task while nonetheless trudging along its bloody contours to its bleak endpoint.

The film opens with a beautiful shot of a pristine white tile bathroom filling with steam.

Sundance 2014: Young Hellraiser Fuels Kat Candler’s Impressive Hellion

The first night in Sundance required a deep breath. The Credits is a little more than a year old, so this was our first year here and it’s all slightly overwhelming at the beginning. Although the Festival is a well oiled machine at this point (free shuttles, a slew of press and industry screenings to choose from, and now Uber, expensive as ever), for a first timer here it’s a lot to take in.

We got our bearings and that initial touch of anxiety melted away once the lights went down at the Holiday Village Cinema and the first chords of heavy metal sounded in Kat Candler’s Hellion.

I, Frankenstein Digitally Re-Mastered for IMAX Premiere

“I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” So said Frankenstein’s monster, some 196 years ago in 1818 when Mary Shelley anonymously published her groundbreaking book “Frankenstein” in London. In nine days, her creation will loom larger than ever before when he enters IMAX theaters on January 24 in Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein.

Writer/director Beattie’s film,

From Darryl F. Zanuck to Christine Vachon: The Quotable Producer

Jerry Weintraub, a legendary film producer, took to the stage this past Sunday to accept the Golden Globe for best TV movie or miniseries for Behind the Candelabra. The film was the work of a slew of super talented individuals coming together to create something original and daring. Some of those people include the director Steven Soderbergh, his two stars, Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his young lover Scott Thornson,

From Taliban-Infested Pakistan to Sundance Lab to Screen:These Birds Walk

Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick teamed up to make a documentary that would change their lives. They spent three years, on and off, in Taliban-infested Pakistan making These Birds Walk, a cinema verité look at young orphans and runaways in a Karachi children’s home. The home is run by Abdul Sattar Edhi, whose group runs about 300 centers throughout Pakistan. But the focus of the film is less on Edhi and more on the kids,