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Cinematical has received this exclusive poster for Sugar, which marks Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's long-awaited follow up to their hit indie Half Nelson. This time both Fleck and Boden share writing and directing duties on a film that follows a Dominican baseball star who's recruited to play minor league ball in the United States. Back when Sugar premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Kim called it "insightful and compelling," saying "the baseball scenes are incredibly shot; in fact, the entire film is just gorgeous, like a painting brought to life." I've been itching to see Sugar ever since it was announced; like Half Nelson, I expect a gritty reality that doesn't show up on screen as often as it should. Boden and Fleck have a knack for scraping just below the surface, discovering topics that are either ignored or simply not executed correctly.

Click on the image below to view the entire poster, then head after the jump to check out the trailer. For more on the film, head over to its official website. Sugar arrives in theaters (in NY and LA) on April 3rd.

Last week, indieWIRE ran a provocative piece by Anthony Kaufman about the financial woes of THINKfilm, one of my favorite indie distributors. Kaufman detailed the cash flow problems at THINKfilm, which were causing acrimony between the distrib and many of its filmmakers, who were alleging that the distributor hadn't paid what it owed to them, as well as to advertising companies charged with marketing films under THINKfilm's banner.

Now indieWIRE has a follow-up piece up by Eugene Hernandez, which says that director/producer Alex Gibney, whose film Taxi to the Darkside won the best documentary Oscar this year and was supposed to receive a major theatrical push by THINKfilm following its win, is seeking more than $1 million in damages from the ailing distributor.

While THINKfilm did pay the film's producers the minimums guaranteed by their contract on May 5, Gibney's complaint alleges that THINKfilm failed to disclose that it did not have the financial resources to support the film's theatrical push following its Oscar win, and "jeopardized the success of the film by failing to abide by the terms of contracts it entered into with public relations firms and advisers and failed to pay such firms for work done and expenses incurred."

Hey, not everyone can afford to go to Sundance just for fun. If you don't live in or near Park City, it's pretty darn spendy to travel to the fest. Or maybe you've gone to Sundance in the past, and you'd just like to relive the memories. Sundance Channel is bringing you 31 days of Sundance, starting right ... about ... well, two days ago. But there's still plenty of good watching left. Every night at 9PM, the Sundance Channel will screen a film from past fests, and the lineup is pretty darn impressive, including some of my own fave films such as Adam's Apples by Anders Thomas Jensen (that one's tonight, so set your TIVO or DVR if you'll be out), and ... oh! Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is on Sunday! Next Wednesday is So Yong Kim's In Between Days, and Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart airs January 16.

Thursday, January 17 you'll have a chance to catch the Duplass brothers' hilarious-yet-poignant Puffy Chair (their new film, Baghead, will be reviewed as part of our Sundance coverage this year), and Saturday, January 20 has Half Nelson (directed by Ryan Fleck, starring Ryan Gosling in a breakout role as a crackhead middle school teacher). There are some really good films showing all month long. Seriously, especially if you live in a city without a lot of access to indie film, this is your chance to catch up on a TON of great indie fare, for free.

The films above are just a smattering of the awesome lineup. You'll find the full schedule over at the Sundance Channel website, so make sure to mark your calendar for the ones you don't want to miss.

The creative team behind the indie smash hit Half Nelson (the one where Ryan Gosling plays a crack-addicted history teacher) have decided to go back to school ... again; this time, according to Variety, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden will adapt Marisha Pessl's novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, with Fleck attached to direct and Boden on to exec produce. Pic marks the third project the duo have taken on since first making a splash with Nelson last year; prior to their work on Calamity Physics, Fleck and Boden will co-direct Sugar (based on a script penned by Fleck) in which a Dominican baseball prospect attempts to fight his way to the majors through the U.S. minor league system. Apart from that, they will also adapt and direct another high school-esque dramedy; Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story for Paramount.

Calamity Physics tells of a high school senior who, after spending each of her first three years in a different town with her highly eccentric on-the-go father, finally looks forward to settling down for a full senior year in a North Carolina high school. Eventually she befriends a group of fellow students (and geniuses) referred to as the Bluebloods, and from there it appears a teacher is killed and, before we know it, we're right smack in the middle of a murder-mystery. So much for that normal senior year, huh? Miramax Films and producer Scott Rudin will shovel this one out. Not sure which project they'll take on after Sugar, but having loved Half Nelson, I can't wait to see what these two have in store for us down the line.

Last season, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden had a career year -- the kind most young filmmakers dream about when they're first starting out. Thanks, in part, to a superb Oscar-nominated performance by Ryan Gosling, their Half Nelson went from tiny indie film to major awards contender in the span of only a few months. Now, Fleck and Boden are looking for another break-out performance -- this time, they're heading to the Dominican Republic to find a star. The two will write and direct Sugar, to be produced by Journeyman Pictures and Hunting Lane Films (the two shingles behind Nelson), with HBO Films possibly interested in coming onboard as well.

Pic will delve into the world of minor league baseball, shown through the eyes of a young Dominican prospect snatched from his home country and brought to the United States to play ball. Though the film will be based on a fictional character named Miguel "Sugar" Santos, there's no doubt Fleck and Boden will look to expose the often shady world of baseball scouting by taking an innocent kid and dropping him in a cutthroat, competitive environment. With production set to begin later this summer, Fleck and producers are currently searching for their cast (which could include nonpros) and scouting locations in the Midwest and Dominican. Aside from Sugar, Fleck and Boden have also signed on to write and direct It's Kind of a Funny Story for Paramount.

Not many films take us inside the world of minor league baseball, especially from the vantage point of a foreigner asked to compete with and against a group of guys who have been training their entire lives to land a spot on one of these teams. Fleck chose a very claustrophobic style for Half Nelson, partly because the majority of scenes took place indoors -- thus, I'll be curious to see if he spreads things out a bit now, utilizing the open-aired environment of a baseball diamond as his canvas. Needless to say, I cannot wait for this one.

Over at one of my regular reads, The Guardian, Ryan Gosling, former Mouseketeer-turned-Oscar-nominee, opens up about his Mormon childhood, the job he worked two summers ago in a convenience store ( "It was fun because I had a job where homeless people could tell me what to do.") and the trouble he caused at the Mouse House, when his antics caused the moms of Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears to complain to Disney about him ("I just told them what I heard - like positions and stuff.")

The article also gets into what Gosling has planned next -- a story about child soldiers in Uganda called The Lord's Resistance, his relationship with Rachel McAdams (they famously hated each other on the set of The Notebook, now they're dating long-distance) and his thoughts on Half Nelson. Gosling seems rather surprised to be Oscar-nommed for the role of the crack-using middle school teacher -- he notes that , "I was" planning on being ostracised!" Read the full interview -- you might just learn a thing or two about Gosling you didn't know going in.

Over at The Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson has a compelling piece up about what it took behind the scenes for ThinkFilm to get Ryan Gosling that Oscar nod. Whether you're a filmmaker who thinks, "that'll never happen to me" or "Man, I wish that was me," or just your average cinephile who lives for that kind of geekerific stuff, it's an interesting read.

I remember hearing buzz about Half Nelson at Sundance 2006 and being irked that I'd not caught it there -- I didn't even manage to catch it until months later, at the Seattle International Film Festival. It's fascinating, looking back now, to read all that was going on behind-the-scenes at Sundance a year ago. A major fest like Sundance is this big hive of activity where what you see crawling around on the surface is maybe 20 percent of everything that's going on. And behind the scenes at Sundance last year, while Half Nelson was only quietly beginning to buzz for most folks, ThinkFilm's Mark Urman was already thinking, if only in a whisper, "Oscar?" And now here we are, a little over a year later, with Ryan Gosling actually nominated for Best Actor against some major studio muscle, which is pretty damn cool.

Last year's most buzzed-about films are gearing up for giganto DVD releases, just in time for the Oscar voting period which ends on February 20. With the exception of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (which is set to arrive on DVD this March 6), other major awards contenders like The Departed (February 13), Half Nelson (February 13), Flags of our Fathers (February 6) and Babel (February 20) will hit shelves prior to this year's Oscar ceremony, to be held on February 25. So now there will be no reason for you feel left out, unaware of the nominated films, since you'll have plenty of time to catch the flicks in the comfort of your own home.

And if you're at all wondering which version of Borat we'll get (what with all the bogus lawsuits circling the film), the DVD will contain the original theatrical version (with no changes), as well as deleted scenes and clips of Sacha Baron Cohen (in full Borat attire) attending Cannes, the Toronto fest and Comic-Con. (I don't know about you, but I really want a commentary from Cohen.) As far as the other DVDs go, Martin Scorsese will be introducing an assortment of additional scenes on The Departed disc, and I'm sure Babel, Flags and Half Nelson will include similar extras. Personally, I missed Half Nelson and Babel on the big screen, and so I'll definitely be adding those to my queue as soon as humanly possible.

Which flicks are you looking forward to catching for the first time on DVD?

It ought to be relatively easy to narrow down a list of films I've seen and liked in 2006 into a cogent top ten -- and to be fair, I whittled it down to the top 20 pretty easily -- but figuring out in just what order to rank my final ten was incredibly frustrating. How to rank a list of films, so different from each other, into a semi-ordered list that would be less than random? Equally frustrating was realizing that, in spite of the number of films I did see in 2006, there were still some great films that I missed catching, some of which might have made it onto my list had I seen them. Nonetheless, I can only rank from amongst those films I did see; here then, are my top ten films of the year.

The Boston Society of Film Critics is with the majority on who the best actor and actress of 2006 are. It named Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren in those respective categories for its annual awards on Sunday night. But, the rest of the group's choices are another matter. The Departed, which had so far been unrecognized by the AFI, the NYFCO and the LAFCA (it is expected to do better with the NYFCC), won four awards, including best picture, director, supporting actor (not the one you'd think, though) and screenplay. Other surprising picks were Half Nelson's Shareeka Epps for best supporting actress and its director, Ryan Fleck, for best new filmmaker.

In giving so much love to The Departed, the Boston critics come off as simply favoring the film's setting and shooting locations. But, they can't really be that obvious. Besides, they didn't give so much to Mystic River (only best picture and best ensemble) back in 2003, and that film was just as good and just as representative of Beantown.

Check out the whole list of winners after the jump.