Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of The Right Stuff With Writer/Director Philip Kaufman

“There’s a demon that lives in the air. They say that whoever challenged him would die.” –Levon Helm’s narration at the beginning of The Right Stuff.

Test pilots attempting to break the sound barrier at Muroc Army Air Field in California, where that demon lived, often died. It’s at Muroc where Philip Kaufman’s seminal film begins. Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) has been given the opportunity to try and break the sound barrier in the X-1,

The Carrie Phenomenon: A Brief History of Telekinesis

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” – Marcello Truzzi, the founding co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and the director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research.

Covered in pig’s blood, Carrie surveys the most terrifying scene imaginable—a room full of cackling high schoolers. And they’re all laughing at her. It’s one of the most famous scenes in horror film history, to be relived anew in theaters around the country tonight,

Diablo Cody Discusses Paradise, her Directorial Debut

Diablo Cody is still probably best known for her freshman outing as a screenwriter with Juno, back in 2007. After all, the smart, offbeat comedy-drama about a pregnant teenager earned the Illinois-born-and-bred scribe a flurry of ovations for her original screenplay, including an Oscar, a BAFTA and honors from the Writers Guild of America. But come October 18, Cody, who has since penned and produced Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult and Showtime’s United States of Tara,

Spike Jonze’s Soulful, Searching Sci-Fi Romance Her

A Spike Jonze film is always an event. He’s made four features in fourteen years—starting with Being John Malkovich (1999), a film so singularly peculiar and original (a puppeteer finds a portal that leads into the actual mind of John Malkovich), that the long-time music video director found himself nominated for an Academy Award at the ripe old age of 30.

Malkovich was written by Charlie Kaufman,

Chatting with Jerry Ferrara About Last Vegas, Being Punched by De Niro, & More

In Last Vegas, which boasts the tagline, “It’s going to be legendary,” legendary actors Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline play four old friends (literally) who throw a Las Vegas bachelor party for the only one of them who has remained single all these years. Call them The Wolf pack, 40 years later.

The movie, which hits theaters November 1, was directed by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure,

Everlasting Love: Jim Jarmusch’s Beautiful Only Lovers Left Alive

How often do you walk away from a vampire film and think, ‘Well, that was really lovely’? I’d wager never. Yet that is exactly the feeling I left with after the screening of Only Lovers Left Alive at the New York Film Festival.

True to its title, Only Lovers Left Alive is a love story, even a comedy. It’s a film about Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton),

Fighting Cancer With Music & Film: The Incredible Documentary No Evidence of Disease

How do you spread awareness about a disease killing 30,000 women a year that barely anybody talks about? Naturally, you start a band.

That’s what six gynecologic oncology surgeons from all over the country did when they created N.E.D., an acronym for ‘No Evidence of Disease.’ Initially created as a cover band to entertain their fellow doctors at a medical conference, the members of N.E.D. saw the potential to reach women using a medium that had been transmitting stories for centuries.

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska Delights at the New York Film Festival

Alexander Payne first got Bob Nelson's script for Nebraska back in 2003 or 2004 (he isn’t quite sure). He liked it, and he immediately thought of Bruce Dern for the lead role, so he sent it to him. Dern liked it, and was surprised Payne had thought of him for the lead. Dern was so excited, in fact, he went to Toys R Us and bought a toy truck (a new truck has a lot of significance in the plot) and sent it to Payne,

The U.S. Premiere of 12 Years a Slave at the New York Film Festival

Screening in the United States for the first time, Steve McQueen’s powerful, heart rending 12 Years a Slave once again left a festival audience in silence and many viewers weeping in their seats. The story of Solomon Northup’s betrayal, his years of horror while a slave in Georgia, and his desperation to return home to his family in New York requires the viewer to face an unflinching portrayal of humanity at its worst trying to break a man taken at his best.

One of the Greatest Cinematographers Ever: Gravity‘s Emmanuel Lubezki

He is one of the greatest cinematographers alive, the man directors call when what they want has never been attempted. He has shot films for a slew of legends (Mike Nichols, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers), but it’s Emmanuel Lubezki's relationship with his childhood friend from Mexico, director Alfonso Cuarón, that’s truly one of the great partnerships in the history of the medium. If this sounds overblown,

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,

Inspired by Enough Said: Five Fake Romantic Comedies We’d Love to see

Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said was one of those movies that’s so good it makes you mad, and you wonder why didn’t I think of that? Her premise is simple and brilliant; Julia Louis-Drefyus is Eva, a divorced single parent whose daughter is about to leave for college. She begins seeing Albert (James Gandolfini—if you need a dose of Gandolfini love, there have been great tributes to him, and you can read some of those here,