Iceland has a more robust film industry than you might expect from a small island nation of only 320,000 people, but still, it ain't exactly Hollywood. So when an Icelandic film gains worldwide attention, it's newsworthy.

Such is the case with Jar City, an excellent mystery thriller that Cinematical's Kim Voynar raved about last year at Telluride. It's the highest-grossing film in the country's history, from one of its most successful (and prolific directors), and it won a top prize at the 2007 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

And now it gets the ultimate honor: an American remake! (There may have been sarcasm in the word "honor.") According to The Hollywood Reporter, Overture Films has bought the remake rights and will employ the original writer/director, Baltasar Kormákur, as a producer. No word yet on who will direct the U.S. version, but a writer has been attached: Michael Ross, who wrote Turistas and who THR says is also penning the Near Dark remake.

The Icelandic setting will be changed, of course, to its logical American counterpart: Louisiana. No, really. I'm curious to see how the story transfers, since some of its details relate to the insularity of those small Icelandic communities. Also, I loved that the detective in the original was a total badass despite looking like a nerdy college professor. (That's him in the picture.) I hope they keep that element for the remake. William H. Macy would be perfect.

As far as I can determine, this is the first time an Icelandic film has officially gotten an American remake. If anyone knows differently, let me know. Otherwise, I'm marking this as a historic first for our friends in the North Atlantic.

In this weekend's well-meaning docudrama, Flash of Genius, Greg Kinnear portrays an inventor who struggled for years to sue car manufacturing behemoth Ford and get them to admit that they helped themselves to his patent on the intermittent windshield wiper. (Eugene reviewed it back at Telluride, and I basically agree with his assessment.)

Despite the real-life case being settled a couple of decades ago, Ford has taken this current opportunity to point out the factual inaccuracies in the movie that they've taken issue with, doing so in the form of this handy timeline, without causing any sort of formal stir, as covered in this accompanying text. Especially considering that the film's subject, Robert Kearns, passed away over three years ago, I doubt it would (and hope it won't) come to any sort of renewed head.

Maybe in thirty years or so, we'll get a movie about a blogger battling impossible odds to get all the facts straight on either side of a movie in which an inventor battled impossible odds to get just some facts straight. Now, to just work the word 'Genius' back into the title...

Under no circumstances is Ji-woon Kim's The Good, the Bad, the Weird a great movie, but I found myself genuinely impressed with it. The pitch – "Korean comic spaghetti western" – sounded like the sort of ultra-hip, insubstantial, self-consciously campy Asian actioner I've grown tired of; I kept flashing back to Riyuhei Kitamura's much-hyped but totally useless Versus, an acquired taste I haven't acquired. I needn't have worried. Though Kim's western pastiche may be insubstantial, it's anything but a drag. It's masterfully directed, legitimately funny, and legitimately fun, thoroughly enjoyable even at an excessive 129 minutes.

Though you may think you're here to see how Kim (whom you may remember from his terrific horror entry A Tale of Two Sisters) plays with the western genre, you're really here for the action sequences. There are two spectacular ones: the rollicking train robbery that opens the film, and a later all-stops-out chase scene involving several gangs of bandits and the Japanese army. These aren't the sort of scenes that bring you to the edge of your seat, but rather the sort that put a steady, delighted grin on your face. Unapologetically goofy, absurdly attenuated, brilliantly paced, and backed by a rousing musical score, they alone make the film worth sitting through.

In spite of the writer's strike keeping several larger films that otherwise would have been on the Telluride slate out of this year's fest, and the absence of Cannes Palm d'or winner The Class, which many had hoped to see here (that film is opening the upcoming New York Film Festival, and so was unable to play at Telluride), the 35th Telluride Film Festival was a solid success.

The fest scored sneak previews of Danny Boyle's hotly anticipated Slumdog Millionaire, which was very well received by audiences, and gave North American premieres to some films that you'll likely be hearing about come Oscar time, including I've Loved You So Long, Flame and Citron, and Adam Resurrected, and Everlasting Moments.

The Telluride Film Festival has wrapped up and we're gearing up for our non-stop coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow. Just in case you missed any of our coverage from the Telluride Film Festival, here's a roundup of what we saw there. Most of these films will also be playing at Toronto as well; if you attended Telluride or are going to TIFF, be sure to let us know which films you love or hate -- we always enjoy hearing what our smart Cinematical cinephiles think about the films they catch at fests.

Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle): Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ... read more

Adam Resurrected, adapted by Noah Stollum Stollman from the book of the same name by Yoram Kaniuk and directed by Paul Schrader, is a darkly abstract and haunting film featuring Jeff Goldblum in his finest, most layered performance ever. Goldblum portrays Adam Steiner, a tragic clown shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust. A clown and ringleader of his own highly successful circus act in pre-War Berlin, Adam finds himself, his wife, and their two young daughters caught in the roundup of Jews. Ironically, his audience was once full of soldiers in Nazi uniforms; now the very people Adam spent his life making happy are just as happy to see him and his family exterminated.

Adam in the present is a prisoner of his memories of those terrible years, and now resident ringleader of a fictional asylum for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. He's a man with a fractured soul, and as a result of his unrelenting anguish and guilt, he astounds the doctors in charge of the asylum by the ability of his mind to make his body bleed and even grow malignant tumors as he repeatedly dies and is reborn.

For the cinephile, discovering a new film by famed Swedish director Jan Troell (one of this year's Telluride tributees) is a lot like eating a perfectly made truffle after a lifetime of mass-produced candy bars. His latest effort, Everlasting Moments, was like that for me; it's that rare cinematic experience that you settle back, bite into, and then savor as the subtle richness of the film cleanses the palate and fills the soul.

Based on the real-life story of Troell's wife's grandmother, the film takes us through the life of Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen, in a remarkable performance), a belabored mother of a large brood in the early days of the 20th century who finds renewed passion and intellectual independence through a Contessa camera she wins in a lottery. The camera sits for many years unused until one day, Maria takes it into the shop of the local photographer, Sebastien Pederson (Jesper Christensen), to sell it to help pay the rent.

The kindly Pederson shows Maria how to use the camera, and once she starts using it, she begins to see the world through a whole new lens. Finding herself unable to resist continuing to learn and improve her eye as a photographer, Maria becomes obsessed with capturing the little moments of life around her through the miraculous ability to capture living moments in still images.

A few stray thoughts from the end of the festival, hopefully of general interest. I still have one more review in the pipeline, which should come tomorrow afternoon.

- I am even more gung-ho about Slumdog Millionaire than Kim. It sort of ruined the last day and a half of the festival, because I've been unable to think about much else. I want to see it at least a dozen more times, immediately.

- I need to say something about With a Little Help from Myself, François Dupeyron's follow-up to the arthouse hit Monsieur Ibrahim. It's a respectable, low-key drama set in a French housing project, featuring a justly-acclaimed performance by Félicité Wouassi as a woman working to keep her head above water and her family together despite a seemingly infinite number of obstacles. It gets a bit too cute at points -- there's a subplot regarding the protagonist's sex-starved neighbor that is the epitome of "neither here nor there" -- but it's mostly the sort of solid, unpretentious film I greet with open arms at festivals. There's enough buzz about Wouassi that if you live in a city, you'll surely see it at a theater near you sooner rather than later.

Happy-Go-Lucky, the newest film by director Mike Leigh, has been getting high praise at the Telluride Film Festival for Sally Hawkins' performance as Poppy, a primary school teacher with an optimistic nature. In this clip (see below), Poppy is taking a driving lesson from Scott (Eddie Marsan), a tightly wound driving instructor who's Poppy's polar opposite. The scenes between Poppy and Scott are some of the best and funniest in the film; this one will give you a little taste of it. Happy-Go-Lucky plays at the Toronto International Film Festival before opening in limited release October 10. You can read our full review of the film from Telluride right here.

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one. Chronicling the true story of a college professor's fight to reclaim his invention – the intermittent windshield wiper – from the car company that stole it, the film does many of the things you'd expect, but it may also surprise you. Don't let its Telluride placement fool you: this is a staunchly mainstream, unchallenging film, the sort of underdog-vs.-corporate-behemoth story you've seen time and again. But it's a decent rendition, hitting the right notes without insulting our intelligence.

Now, the intermittent windshield wiper is not exactly the light bulb. If you're not familiar with the term, the wiper is "intermittent" in the sense that it can pause between wipes – a problem that apparently puzzled engineers at all the major car companies until Kearns cracked it the late 60s. But part of what's nifty about the film is its ability to create suspense and curiosity around something so seemingly mundane. Kearns' first demo of his device to Ford is exciting in a very goofy way, but exciting nonetheless.