Festival Reports »

If you can't make it to Park City, Utah, in January for the Sundance Film Festival, don't worry -- Sundance will come to you! Sort of! If you live in one of eight specific cities! Still, it's a good start, and a pretty nifty idea.

They're calling it Sundance Film Festival U.S.A., and it will work like this. On Jan. 28, while the festival is taking place in Utah, eight filmmakers from the fest will travel to theaters around the country to show their movies to local audiences, followed by the customary Q&A. For the local audiences, it will be a decent approximation of what a real Sundance screening is like, minus the insane crowds and absence of parking. Several of the chosen cities are even in snowy climes, so you won't have to miss out on that aspect of Sundance attendance. If you're lucky, for the full effect, maybe you'll even run into a journalist complaining about the weather.

The selected theaters are: Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, Mass.; BAM, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Music Box Theatre, Chicago; Downtown Independent, Los Angeles; Sundance Cinemas, Madison, Wisc.; Belcourt Theatre, Nashville; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, San Francisco. Tickets will be sold through the individual theaters. Each location will get a different film, and we won't know what those films are until after the festival announces its programming in December.

Dispatching filmmakers to appear with their movies live and in person is a cool innovation, and a good way to spread the Sundance vibe beyond the confines of Park City. But it makes me wonder if the next logical step is to simply beam the films via satellite to theaters around the country, the way they do with concerts and special events. As big as Sundance is getting, and as small as Park City is staying, I'm glad to see the festival expanding its reach any way it can.

In Austin, you can set your watch by the fall film festivals. We don't just have SXSW in the spring. Starting around Labor Day, it feels like we have a film festival practically every week, from Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival (aGLIFF) to the Austin Polish Film Festival, Austin Asian American Film Festival and of course Fantastic Fest. One of the oldest and biggest of these local autumn fests is Austin Film Festival (AFF), which spans eight days and seven screening venues, and includes a screenwriters' conference. In 2009, AFF celebrated its 16th year.

AFF focuses on screenwriters even in its film programming selections, as was evident with the opening-night film. Serious Moonlight is best known as the last script written by the late actress/filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. I admit I wasn't fond of the movie, but director Cheryl Hines was a trip -- mock-vampy on the red carpet (as shown above), and full of excitement about her film. Her screening was up against heavy competition: Matthew Weiner brought an episode of Mad Men to the festival and didn't reveal which one until just before it screened. (It turned out to be this season's "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency" episode.) Weiner also was featured in panels during the conference portion of AFF.

It's not hard to like any movie that uses the Beach Boys' music, but Wes Anderson makes it especially easy. As Hollywood's foremost purveyor of hipster drama, his pedigree as a reliable selector of appropriately wistful, poignant and all-around unforgettable songs is virtually unrivaled, but Fantastic Mr. Fox exceeds even the work of his earlier films, using "Heroes and Villains," and later, "I Get Around" as populist punctuation that manages to be both specifically relevant and substantively rousing.

As an animated opus, the film is by necessity his most controlled to date, a painstakingly-designed dollhouse where he no longer controls just the music, sets, and costumes, but the performers themselves. Ironically, however, it feels like his loosest as well - a gloriously unwieldy comedy of manners submerged in the minutiae of Anderson's madcap creativity. All of which makes Fantastic Mr. Fox a celebration both of its stop-motion medium and Anderson's aesthetic, while still managing to fully document the spectacular fun in original author Roald Dahl's daffy, distinctive imagination.

The Messenger opened the 12th Savannah Film Festival with a bang: a sellout crowd, international press, and Hollywood stars Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster in attendance to rub elbows all night. Even without the glitz, though, Savannah was a smart place to screen the Iraq drama. Oren Moverman's film is a character study about a soldier (Foster) dealing with the aftermath of war, but like Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq film The Hurt Locker, it's about the personal toll Iraq leaves on soldiers who survive and the families of those who don't; the politics of war are hardly an issue. And so, in a city that supports two military bases and the men and women who serve them, The Messenger played like gangbusters.

Foster stars as William Montgomery, a recent Iraq returnee dealing with serious leftover issues and a new assignment to play out his final three months of service: informing families that their loved ones have been killed on duty. As Montgomery's partner, Harrelson provides moments of levity, but there were plenty of sniffles throughout the film just the same.

While it was pretty easy to figure out what the general consensus was, there were three figures in particular I was watching for a reaction – the only three uniformed soldiers in attendance, who may or may not have been connected to the production. (The film has been screened for military personnel, and Harrelson and Foster personally met soldiers at Hunter Army Airfield prior to the night's screening.) When asked what military folk have thought of his film in the post-screening Q&A, director Moverman deferred to one of the officers in the audience to share his reaction with the crowd. What follows is the unnamed soldier's impromptu review of The Messenger.

I'm in Savannah, Georgia to spend a week as a guest blogger for the Savannah Film Festival, an eight-day fest hosted in the historic Southern town by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). [Read my entries in the "Voices from the Fest" section on the festival website.] As the town prepares to kick off the 12th annual festivities with the Iraq film, or rather post-Iraq film, The Messenger, I'm wondering how SFF's growing success might reflect or even influence the rise of film festivals that similarly fall somewhere in between the biggies (Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Venice) and the little guys.

For starters, a brief look at SFF's line-up and star-studded guest list. The festival begins today, October 31, with The Messenger, a Sundance entry that has Oscar possibilities but more likely will make a run at the Indie Spirit Awards. Stars Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster will be in attendance. (I will be attempting to run into them at the local Starbucks or wherever it is that Hollywood actors hang out when they visit other cities.) Another Oscar hopeful, the Emily Blunt-starring period biopic The Young Victoria, is screening the following day.

And then there are the almost certain Oscar pictures: George Clooney in The Men Who Stare At Goats; Lone Scherfig's An Education; Michael Haneke's Cannes winner The White Ribbon; Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, with star Jeremy Renner in attendance; and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which will bring both director Lee Daniels and his star Gabourey Sidibe to town.

Read on for more about this year's Savannah Film Festival.

Regular Cinematical readers will remember that I've famously said I can never watch Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust thank to violence it commits against animals, but I have definitely seen my share of gross, weird, and deeply disturbing movies. Until recently, the most f*cked up thing I've ever watched is probably Jorg Buttgereit's 1987 film Nekromantik, which climaxes – literally – with a guy stabbing himself to death as he ejaculates blood. But Sunday's offerings at Screamfest offered a new contender in this dubious competition to show audiences the depths of human depravity: specifically, The Human Centipede is precisely the kind of cult sensation that earns immortality on the merits of its gobsmacking levels of gore, despite the fact that all in all it's really not a very good film.

Dieter Laser stars as Dr. Heiter, a reclusive German surgeon who specializes in separating conjoined twins. Pining for the loss of his beloved 3-dog – in fact, rottweilers that he surgically attached end-to-end – Heiter recruits a series of unwitting victims, including a trucker, two American tourists (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), and a Japanese playboy (Akihiro Kitamura), for his latest experiment. But when his victims give him more trouble than he expects – including unwanted attention from the authorities - Dr. Heiter is forced to decide whether to abandon his latest project, or protect it from the outside world – with their and his very lives, if necessary.

The CMJ Festival ended Friday night with a whimper -- well, maybe that was me whimpering after I left a special screening of the spooky ooky alien thriller, The Fourth Kind. In case you haven't checked out the trailers and featurettes on the official site, I'll give you a quick breakdown -- the movie switches between "real" footage of director Olatunde Osunsanmi interviewing Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychiatrist in Nome, Alaska, an area with an allegedly high rate of reported alien abductions, and Milla Jovovich playing Tyler as she struggles with the mysterious death of her husband and her patients' nightmares and mental breakdowns. Interestingly enough, the movie also sometimes intersperses Tyler's "real" footage of her sessions with clients with Jovovich acting them out using split screens. In any case, despite any questions as to the validity of the Tyler story and problems with the last third of the movie, I found it pretty damn scary. The Fourth Kind will be begin probing theatergoers on November 6th. (Note: It's unclear whether this was the final cut or not.)

CMJ, the multi-pronged music network that offers both online and print info for fans, industry insiders, and professionals, is also famous for its music and film festival that has NYC hipsters, journalists, and reps looking for the Next Big Thing raring to go. The CMJ Festival starts today and ends Saturday, so expect dispatches on what I'm checking out on the film front. From super small docs on techo music, Elliott Smith, and Leonard Cohen to star-studden films like The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Messenger, and The Fourth Kind, CMJ has a cool mix of music-related films and more general fare. The festival also offers panels on everything from how to break into film scoring to what the film industry can learn from the music industry on the digital piracy front.

While some of the films offer walk-up ticketing, you can also register for all-you-can-eat badges, and students get a discount. Visit CMJ's official festival website for the full film schedule.

Cinematical's big daddy Moviefone will also be covering the festival, so be sure to check in there too!

You know it's October when there's not merely a multitude of horror films finding their way into theaters, but a full-fledged film festival of them to fill your appetite for flayed and filleted flesh. The eight-year-old Screamfest LA starts Friday, October 16 with a screening of The Tournament and runs through October 25; in addition to offering some 20 feature films, three shorts programs and an awards dinner, horror fans will get an opportunity to see upcoming theatrical releases ahead of time, and maybe even hobnob with a few of their favorite stars. All of the films are being screened in the heart of Hollywood at Grauman's Chinese Theaters.

While we'll be covering more of the festival as it progresses, check out a couple of the must-see movies that are screening in its first few days:

Why review a Japanese-language film without sensational violence, naked ninjas, or giant robots? Because when it's a movie as smartly comic, raggedly rocking, warmly appealing, and richly rewarding as Yoshihiro Nakamura's Fish Story, you want the whole world to know. Or, at least, people who don't happen to be in Austin right now.

Not that Fish Story is the best movie ever made, but it certainly deserves to be seen by a wider audience than will have a chance to see it at special events like Fantastic Fest. And distributors tend to shy away from films that don't have easily marketable elements, like those mentioned in the opening line. In several important ways, this is a rather modest little flick, and I don't want to hype it out of proportion to its relative merits. But I must say: Fish Story engages, delights, and surprises as it criss-crosses wildly through the decades, and I think it's the kind of movie that a broad variety of people would enjoy, if only they had a chance to sample its many pleasures.

Rather than a fish, or fishes, the linchpin of the narrative is a song entitled "Fish Story," recorded by an obscure Japanese punk band in 1975 (one year before the Sex Pistols were formed). Unappreciated in their own time, the band's song takes on a life of its own over the years, still entrancing listeners in a record store in 2012. A comet is about to strike the earth, and mankind only has five hours left to live. With the rest of the populace departed to supposedly safer high ground, three men come together, listening to the record and fantasizing that, somehow, the song will be able to save the world.