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,

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,

Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others,

Vision Quest: 5 Cinematographers & Their Unique Techniques

The role of cinematographer is a sort of hybrid between translator (of a director’s vision), guru (they impart wisdom to everyone on set on how a scene can be blocked, shot) and first mate. They’re as close to a director’s equal as you can get in the dictatorship that is a film. While every member of a film crew, to varying degrees, shapes the final product that we see in the theater, the cinematographer is second only to the director to the power they exert.

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.

What’s it Like to be a Science Advisor for Alfonso Cuarón’s Upcoming Gravity?

In Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming film Gravity (opening Oct. 4), George Clooney and Sandra Bullock play an astronaut and a medical engineer stranded in space.

Cuarón reportedly spent five years perfecting the look of scenes set in zero gravity, but figuring out how to film floating actors was just one of many technical details necessary for a movie set entirely in space. And one key player in the film’s accuracy never stepped foot on the set.

Singing for his Supper: 7 Questions With Icon John Waters

How many of us can say we really did it our way? Frank Sinatra sure seemed like he did. Who else? Who else seemed to not only live the life they wanted to lead, but a life that was in many ways counter to the way everybody else was doing it? Sinatra certainly did it his way, but he was hardly an outlier—he had a whole pack.

You know whom I’m driving towards,

A Q&A With Producer & Filmmaking Powerhouse Christine Vachon

Christine Vachon is one of the most important film producers in New York.  She has maintained close relationships with a bevy of influential filmmakers while shepherding some of the most challenging, dark and often beautiful films into the world. She has helped provide a voice for directors who might otherwise have been marginalized—she has helped provide some of the juiciest (and most harrowing) female roles to actresses from Julianne Moore to Cate Blanchett to Hillary Swank,

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,

Talking to Jane Lynch About her new Film Afternoon Delight

Since premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Jill Soloway’s provocative comedy about sex, marriage and finding oneself, Afternoon Delight, has garnered praise (Soloway won best director at this year's Sundance Film Festival)  — with many singling out Jane Lynch’s performance as one of the fest’s best. Afternoon Delight follows Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), a hip, Silver Lake, California, mom with a lackluster sex life, who takes in a homeless stripper (Juno Temple) to spice things up.

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,