Cinematical just received this exclusive poster for What Just Happened? (click to enlarge), which comes to us from director Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Wag the Dog). Based on producer Art Linson's memoir What Just Happened? Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line, the film stars Robert De Niro as a middle-aged Hollywood producer who tries to juggle an actual life with an outrageous series of crises in his day job.

As you can see from the poster, however, this puppy is packed with talent. You've got De Niro, Sean Penn, Bruce Willis, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, Catherine Keener and the list goes on. When What Just Happened? premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Cinematical's James Rocchi described it as "movie geek heaven," saying De Niro produces "his best 'sly' comedic work since (probably) Wag the Dog." And how can you not love that poster and its tagline? Hilarious. Really looking forward to seeing this one when it arrives in a few months. (Check out the full synopsis after the jump)

What Just Happened? is set to hit theaters on October 3.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the opening night premiere of American Teen (in theaters July 25) as part of the third annual Sundance Institute at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). The Sundance fav launched an eleven-day festival of sorts, showcasing the best of the best from this year's Sundance Film Festival; 22 features and 36 shorts in total, plus filmmaker Q&As, parties, art installations and tons of Brooklyn hipster-watching.

The screening itself was completely sold out and held inside the gorgeous BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, where, conveniently, free popcorn and bottles of water were handed out at the door. And as my wife pointed out after we sat down: "They're smart -- free things always put a person in a good mood before a film." Indeed! Before the curtain rose on American Teen, a number of folks approached the mic for some words, while the crowd cheered every time 'Brooklyn' was used in a sentence. The speakers included BAM President Karen Hopkins, Sundance executive director Ken Brecher, Brooklyn Borough President (and an awesome guy) Marty Markowitz, Katherine Oliver, Commissioner of the NYC Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, BAM Cinema Club Chairs Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, and, finally, American Teen director Nanette Burstein (sporting a very pregnant belly) and one of the film's teenage stars, Hannah Bailey (pictured above).

Check out a gallery from the premiere, the film and the prom-themed after party below -- then head after the jump for my thoughts on American Teen. (All pictures courtesy of the fine folks at the Sundance Institute and Paramount Vantage.)

Cinematical has received this exclusive clip from the upcoming documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which premiered earlier this year to very good reviews at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which was directed by Chris Bell and comes from the producers of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, takes a long, hard look at the steroids issue from all sides. When we sat down with Bell for an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival, he summed up the film in pretty simple terms: "Some guys are saying steroids will kill you and others say they'll make live longer. Who's telling the truth? We tried to study the truth so that, as an audience member, you can draw your own conclusions."

In the clip above, Bell confronts bodybuilder (and model) Christian Boeving and asks whether he thinks it's wrong to promote fitness pills, etc ... when it's clear steroids played a key role in getting his body to where it is today. As the last line in the film's synopsis so eloquently puts it, "When you discover that your heroes have all broken the rules, do you follow the rules, or do you follow your heroes?" For more, check out the film's official website.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster arrives in theaters on May 30.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for the film Baghead (click on the image to enlarge), written and directed by two very good friends of this site, Jay and Mark Duplass. Baghead marks the brothers' second feature-length film and follow-up to the very funny (but very uncomfortable) 2005 flick The Puffy Chair. Starring Ross Partridge, Elise Muller, Steve Zissis and my personal fav Greta Gerwig, Baghead tells of four struggling actors who retreat to a cabin in the woods in an attempt to write a screenplay they can produce and star in themselves. Will they succeed or will their personal relationships crumble? Oh, and is there really a stranger with a bag over his head lurking in the shadows, tracking the group's every move?

Baghead premiered to all sorts of great buzz back at Sundance, where our own James Rocchi said it "has warmth and innovation, and the mischievous good sense to subtly make fun of the type of film that it is." As Mark Duplass told us when we interviewed the boys during Sundance, "Baghead is a movie about the funny, horrific, tragic, terrible life of being a desperate actor." Needless to say, we highly recommend it.

Baghead arrives in theaters on June 13, after making a stop at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for the film The Visitor (click on the image for a larger version), which has already played a number of festivals (Toronto, Sundance) and marks the sophomore effort for writer-director Thomas McCarthy, whose Station Agent was all sorts of warm and toasty. In The Visitor, Richard Jenkins stars as a boring economics professor who travels to New York City for a conference. But when he unlocks the door to his seldom-used NYC apartment, he realizes two other people are living there. That's nice. In his review from Sundance, our own Scott Weinberg noted: "The result is a movie with a message, sure, but it works even better as a touching look at a lonely man who finds some warmth, friendship and affection in the most unexpected of places: His own forgotten apartment." The Visitor arrives in theaters (in limited release) on April 11.

Well, the Golden Globes are over (boy, that was exciting), so now I'm going to turn my attention to something I really care about: Sundance, baby! In gearing up for 2008, I decided to take a glance back through our Sundance coverage from last year ... a little walk through the past to remind myself of all the great films I saw last year, and to keep my current pre-Sundance stress level in perspective. In going back through our Sundance 2007 coverage, I came across this journal entry from former Cinematical editor Karina Longworth (now editor over at Spoutblog) written just before the fest started:

Reading Eugene Hernandez' blog whilst waiting the for the cab to arrive to take me to La Guardia this morning, I learned that David Poland and Jeffrey Wells have declared that Sundance 2007, which officially begins tonight, is, in fact, already over. You see, they arrived in Park City a good 48 hours ahead of me, took turns inserting their thermometers in the rectum of the festival, and rushed to their computers to report the reading: cold. In fact, according to Wells, EVERYONE is saying that this year's line-up looks "flat, so-so, nothing to write home about material...a couple of almost-but-not-quite- as-good-as-Half Nelson flicks, and apparently nothing even close to a Little Miss Sunshine-type breakout waiting to happen."

And of course, rumors of the early death of last year's Sundance proved to be false -- more than a few Sundance flicks got bought last year (though we're still not-so-patiently waiting for some of them to actually see light of day), and a decent number of Sundance flicks ended up being critical darlings and finding audiences outside the fest (Waitress, Once, The Savages, Away from Her, War/Dance, No End in Sight). Some of the films I enjoyed last year, including Son of Rambow and Teeth, are finally getting a release in 2008.

Well, this could be interesting. I got a press release about this free service being offered by an outfit called Cha-Cha, a "human-powered search engine" (and doesn't that just give you a mental picture of a bunch of kids in third-world countries furiously pedaling stationary bikes to power it?). Okay, not that kind of "human power;" ChaCha has "guides" who will answer the questions you text to them, like, "where can I find an arthouse theater near Oklahoma City?" (good luck with that one, until Landmark gets around to opening a theater here).

This could come in pretty handy when you're out on the town on that hot date, and you've planned on dinner at that new sushi place followed by the movie, and just found out that your date hates seafood and is a film snob who only watches subtitled films, but what's really kind of cool is that they're kicking things off at the Sundance Film Festival, by offering their service for free with instant access to all the latest Sundance news. If you're at Sundance, and want to know where you can grab dinner without having made a reservation, or whether that buzzed-about film is sold out, you can text your question to ChaCha and they'll find the answer for you. If you're not at Sundance and want to feel like you are, you can get the latest Sundance news from the service as well.

Of course, we'll have all the Sundance news you can handle here at the awesome Sundance hub we're building as we speak, but for those times when you just need an answer NOW, this might be a cool service to check out. I'll try the service out myself when I'm on the ground at Park City, and let you know how accurate their info is.

We don't know, but we're sure to find out in a little over a month from now as Morgan Spurlock's Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden is scheduled to premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It's taken some time to get a new feature doc out of Spurlock, who arrived on the scene in a Big (Mac) way following his break-out hit Super Size Me. Since then, he's shelled out a couple seasons of the very entertaining TV show 30 Days, as well as attached himself as producer to docs like What Would Jesus Buy. Above is our first look at the new Spurlock film, which follows the filmmaker as he attempts what the United States government hasn't been able to do: Find the elusive and infamous Osama Bin Laden.

The film first screened for a select group of buyers earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival. At the time, it was the talk of the town (mainly because those in attendance were asked to sign some insane confidentiality agreement) -- and I remember the buzz could be heard in front of every screening for the next several days. Eventually, The Weinstein Co. wound up with the doc and, according to some involved, Spurlock uncovered some insane stuff. But did he find Bin Laden? I, personally, cannot wait to find out. Currently, no release date is scheduled, though we'll have a full review of the film once our Cinematical team arrives in Park City, Utah next month.

[via Slashfilm]

If there's one thing Michael Douglas does really well, it's crazy. In 1993, he did crazy to near-perfection as William "D-Fens" Foster in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down. I still think of Douglas's performance in that film 14 years later -- I ruminated on it most recently while stuck in traffic for 40 minutes due to road construction on my way to the Telluride Film Festival. Visions of Douglas wigging out and blowing up the construction site after he confronts the foreman and confirms his long-held suspicion that there was, in fact, no reason whatsoever for the construction that was tying up traffic danced in my head as I sat there whiling away the endless minutes. Douglas tackled a different kind of crazy in Wonder Boys, the film adaptation of one of my favorite novels, in which he perfectly embodied Professor Grady Tripp, who's gotten lost in a haze of pot smoke while having an affair with his boss's wife and endlessly writing a novel called Wonder Boys, which seems to have no end.

In King of California, which played at Sundance earlier this year and opens theatrically this weekend, Douglas tackles another kind of crazy as Charlie: long-haired, wild-eyed dad to a teenage daughter, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood, who's become rather the go-to girl of the moment for angsty teen girl roles). As we enter Charlie and Miranda's story, Charlie has just returned home after a relaxing two-year stay in a mental institution, during which the now 16-year-old Miranda has fended for herself, dropping out of school in order to hold down a crappy fast-food job to pay the bills and keep their dilapidated house, and even buy her own car. Miranda has achieved a measure of scrappy independence without Charlie in her life, and his reappearance is met with something less than the enthusiasm Charlie anticipated.

Even with all the films our Sundance team saw in Park City this year, each of us left having missed more than one film we really wanted to catch. Such is the reality of a film fest -- there's just never enough time or energy to see and do everything. Nevertheless, Cinematical brought you a slew of coverage over the course of the fest, including reviews, interviews, deal news, happenings around town and all the minor controversies that seem like a big deal at the time and will be completely forgotten two months from now. Here now, all in one place, is a round-up of what we brought your way from this year's Sundance Film Festival. Most of it is after the jump....


REVIEWS

Premieres
An American Crime
Away From Her
Black Snake Moan
Chapter 27
Chicago 10
The Good Night
King of California
The Savages
Son of Rambow
Year of the Dog


Independent Drama Competition
Adrift in Manhattan
Broken English
Four Sheets to the Wind
The Good Life
Grace is Gone
Hounddog
On the Road With Judas
Rocket Science
Snow Angels - Kevin's Take
Snow Angels - James' Take
Teeth - Kim's Take
Teeth - Scott's Take
Weapons