UPDATE: Here's the trailer in Quicktime quality.

Of all the films I'm looking forward to this fall, Blindness ranks fairly high up there. Canadian distributor Alliance has just made available a full trailer that proves to be fairly intriguing, as an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his seemingly immune wife (Julianne Moore) cope with an inexplicable epidemic of sight loss.

I'm a sucker for most anything vaguely apocalyptic, and while this very well could turn out to be akin to watching the first act of Children of Men through a milk-filled mask (which I've done, mind you), the prestige behind the project* says otherwise. We have acclaimed screenwriter Don McKellar adapting Nobel-Laureate José Saramago's novel, with Academy Award nominee Fernando Meirelles directing a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, and Sandra Oh.

I must say, going off that taste and last spring's teaser, I still like the look, sound, and feel of this one, especially Moore's little retort (you know the one), and that's not to mention that any trailer which employs John Murphy's underrated score from last year's Sunshine to set a rightfully ominous tone is always fine by me. We'll get to see (sorry) what trials and tribulations await the world on September 19th.

*Not to mention Rocchi's review of the film from its Cannes world premiere.

Odd Horten (Bard Owe) knows who he is and what he does. He's a driver for the train, and has spent so many years on the same route that he knows it instinctively; he has his work, he has his life. But in Bent Hamer's O' Horten, which played in the Un Certain Regard selection this year at Cannes (and has since been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics), Horten has to face the fact that his life, as he knows it, is changing; he's hit retirement age, and he simply has no clue what to do next.

Hamer's earlier films had a finely-tuned capacity for observation, perhaps best demonstrated in Eggs (1995) and Kitchen Stories (2003); Hamer's English-language debut, Factotum (2005), took the boozy, woozy prose of Charles Bukowski and put a little air and space in it, turning the alcohol-fueled anger of Bukowski's words which, on the page, hit like a shot of cheap whiskey and turning them into something smoother and finer with the smooth burn of regret going down. In O'Horten, Hamer's back in Norway, and still crafting careful, considered portraits of day to day life, but ones which nonetheless have a deadpan comedy to them, a careful and humane sense of the absurd.

If I had one wish and one wish only, I think I'd like to be Javier Bardem throughout the duration of filming Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the latest film from writer-director Woody Allen. A new trailer for the flick has just debuted over at Moviefone, and while it's kinda hard to make out what's going on in the movie (there's no dialogue; just music), this definitely looks steamy, romantic, dramatic and, ahem, hot. Starring Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz and Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona marks Allen's first film shot in Spain and it revolves around a painter (Bardem) who winds up "involved" with two American tourists (Johansson and Hall). Cruz plays Bardem's jealous ex-girlfriend, and if the final shot of the trailer is any indication, she definitely takes her jealousy to the next level.

Based on early buzz, there's apparently a sexy threesome scene between Bardem, Johansson and Cruz in the film, as well as a little back-and-forth kissing between Johansson and Cruz (which is teased in the preview). Needless to say, the 2008 Festival de Cannes is the perfect place to premiere such a film -- and our own James Rocchi and Kim Voynar are currently on the ground in France, itching to bring you tons of coverage later this week (including a review of this seductive-looking film).

Check out the trailer above (or over on Moviefone) and let us know what you think below. Vicky Cristina Barcelona arrives in theaters on August 29.

With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).

Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.

When you're dealing with one of the most controversial figures of 20^th century counterculture, it's important to take your time and get things right. That's exactly what Steven Soderbergh appears to be doing with his two upcoming Che Guevara biopics, The Argentine and Guerilla. While both movies looked like they were set to premiere at next month's Cannes Film Festival just a few weeks ago, Variety now reports that Soderbergh is still tweaking the final cuts-and doesn't want to unveil one movie without the other.

Judging by the polarizing figure at the center of the story, that's probably a good thing. Since Soderbergh envisioned these two films as a single unit, it wouldn't make sense to reveal one half of the saga and let people start tearing into it. Considering Fidel Castro's recent retirement, this essential component of Cuban history seems especially relevant, but that's not enough to develop interest in it (topicality didn't help Steven Spielberg's Munich). It's hard to keep audiences interested in a story that stretches across two movies, as we learned with the muted reaction to Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima film. Soderbergh will need to get strong reactions to both movies early in the game if they're going to have any success in theaters.

A new trend seems to find these big summer blockbusters premiering at the early summer film festivals. Last year, Spider-Man 3 took over Tribeca (and I'd expect the Tribeca folks to try to woo Iron Man to premiere this year), and films like Ocean's 13 premiered at the Cannes Film Festival a couple weeks later. Now, Fox News says folks from the Cannes festival are in talks with Steven Spielberg's reps in an attempt to premiere Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the festival this May. While it will debut only a week or so prior to the official release here in the states, it will give those attending Cannes the jump on getting the first reviews out there.

Cinematical will hopefully be at Cannes again this year, though accreditation is always tight and always up in the air. If Indy does premiere at Cannes, it will likely be the talk of the festival and we assume folks like Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen will be on hand to walk the red carpet. I imagine those peeps heading to Cannes in May just found a new reason to get excited. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull officially arrives in theaters on May 22.

There's almost always some controversy around the Best Foreign category at the Oscars. This or that film doesn't make it in because of some minutae of the rules, and critics (and sometimes, directors and producers) howl in protest. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the category this year, though, it was a bit different. The loudest howls of protest were not over the films excluded for various obscure rules, but over the exclusion of Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu's Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (aka, "that Romanian abortion film." )

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips wrote on his Talking Pictures blog recently (originally posted February 5, and rerun today) about the film's exclusion. Phillips writes that the film was third on his own Top Ten list for the year, saying, "It is a rare film indeed that shows you so much in the way of dire circumstances, yet does not exploit or cheapen the human factor." Phillips talked to Mungiu about the film for this post, and the director has some rather astute things to say about some specific decisions he made with regard to the filmmaking.

When I first heard that the 2007 Cannes jury had chosen Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days to receive its prestigious Palme d'Or, I was crushed. They had chosen the abortion movie, the "issue" movie, over an actual work of art, like Ethan and Joel Coen's No Country for Old Men -- how unlike them. This festival had routinely been ahead of the curve, honoring Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino, Abbas Kiarostami and Gus Van Sant while the Academy was busy doling out awards to George Roy Hill, Ron Howard and Mel Gibson. However, when I finally got a chance to see it at the end of last year, I realized that, once again, the jury had been ahead of the curve. They had identified a new movement, perhaps even a "New Wave," coming from none other than Romania. And I'm not talking about the werewolf movie Blood and Chocolate.

Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu opened to enthusiastic notice in the U.S. in 2006, and I chose Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest as one of the ten best films of 2007. And these are just the films that have been blessed with U.S. distribution. What do these three films have in common? Several actors appear in at least two of the films, and actress Luminita Gheorghiu appears in all three. Cinematographer Oleg Mutu shot both Lazarescu and 4 Months, and Daniel Burlac produced 12:08 and 4 Months. Yet all three films have a similar approach and a similar tone. All three favor long shots, and a slow patient buildup of small details. Each withholds its major plotline until well after the characters are established. It must be something more, something in the air perhaps. Perhaps it's something similar to what was in the air in France in the late 1950s, Hollywood in the early 1970s, Hong Kong in the late 1980s, Iran in the mid-1990s and Argentina in the early 2000s.

One of my dreams for when I'm a millionaire is to spend a year crisscrossing the globe, just traveling from one film festival after another. I've already got the major ones lined up: Sundance in January, South By Southwest in March, Tribeca in April, Cannes in May, Toronto in September; the rest of the slots are still to be determined. I bet if you had unlimited resources, you could literally spend every day of the year at some film festival somewhere.

Well, the helpful folks at Variety have got my back. In Monday's issue, they have an article called 50 Unmissable Film Festivals, and it reads like a wish list for avid film lovers. They list the "Big Five" -- Berlin, Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, and Venice -- right off, then list the rest alphabetically, from Adelaide to Warsaw.

Some of the ones you'd expect to see are on the list. South By Southwest, Telluride, AFI, CineVegas. And then there are others, mostly foreign fests, that I'd never heard of. And I am intrigued!

Camerimage, held in Lodz, Poland, is where "cinematographers are given the rock-star treatment"! What about Courmayeur Noir, at the foot of the Italian Alps, where the focus is mysteries, horror, and suspense films? I've never been to Iran, and can't imagine ever going -- so perhaps my future millionaire self, flanked by dozens of bodyguards, will visit some February for the Fajr Film Fest.

From Guadalajara to Eastern Europe to Seoul to Nantucket (I once knew a man from there!), there's a cool-looking film festival in just about every corner of the world. If you love movies and traveling, check out Variety's list and feel jealous about what you're missing.

Cinematical was lucky enough to land the final one-sheet for the award-winning (and highly-anticipated) drama Control, which marks the feature film directorial debut of photographer and visual artist Anton Corbijn. Control follows the life and times of Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), the enigmatic lead singer of the British band Joy Division. The film has already won tons of praise following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where our own James Rocchi had this to say: "I joke that any rock and roll film can be judged solely on how fiercely it makes you want to go to the record shop immediately afterwards, but Control doesn't just capture the music of Joy Division; it brings Ian Curtis off the posters, out of the speakers, and in doing so rescues a man from his own myth." Control has already snagged one award in Cannes, as well as two more (Michael Powell award for Best New British Feature, PGA Award for Best Performance in a British Film -- Sam Riley) at the Edinburgh Film Festival back in August. Control will begin its screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival tomorrow night, and is set to arrive in theaters on October 10.