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.

(Since Juno is now screening in limited release, we're re-publishing Kim's review of the film from Telluride. We'll also publish a new review of the film when it goes wider later this month.)

I've been waiting to see Juno for a long, long time now. I first heard that Jason Reitman was going to be working with Ellen Page on this film shortly before Sundance this year, and I talked briefly to the young actress about Juno at Sundance. At the time, Page was promoting An American Crime; that film, in which she played Sylvia Likens, a young girl brutally murdered while under the care of a foster family, was emotionally wrenching for Page, and she told me then she was looking forward to taking on some lighter fare with Juno, and especially to working with Reitman, who was still riding the waves of success from his feature debut, Thank You for Smoking.

I was lucky enough to get to see Juno at a jam-packed sneak preview here at Telluride today; it was utterly charming in every possible way, and is getting the most positive buzz I've heard about any film so far at the fest. Page stars as Juno, a smart, quirky, 16-year-old girl who, after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Bleeker (Michael Cera), finds herself pregnant. Right from the start, we know this isn't going to be your average "after-school-special" film about a teenager getting knocked up and facing Big Decisions. Scribe Diablo Cody (aka Brooke Busey-Hunt) sets the tone from the opening scene, with tiny Page chugging a gallon of Sunny Delight while she looks at an abandoned easy chair and tells us, "it all started with a chair." Three pregnancy tests later, Juno accepts that she is, in fact, pregnant, and from there has to decide how to handle it.

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.

I'm home now from the Telluride Film Festival, and we're heading into our massive Toronto coverage, but I wanted to give a quick wrap up of Telluride and those films heading from Telluride up north to the biggest market fest in North America. Telluride is a both a nice predictor of how those films playing both fests are likely to play at Toronto, and a restive break for the filmmakers and publicists before they have to hit the ground running at TIFF. The two fests are polar opposites: Telluride is a relaxing fest where the focus is all on the art of the film, Toronto is much more about the art of making money off those films. From a film journalist's perspective, Telluride is also where you have a chance to meet and chat with filmmakers in an environment that's not, as more than one filmmaker put it to me over Labor Day weekend, the big "dog and pony show" that is Toronto.

Labor Day, the last day of Telluride, is almost all TBAs, which makes it a nice weathervane for which films really played well at the fest. Those films that sold out screenings, that passholders weren't able to get into, will get TBA slots on Monday so everyone gets a shot at seeing them. Good thing too, because, as I've previously discussed, this year there seemed to be an awful lot of passholders who weren't able to get into films they wanted to see, and the poor folks who were just trying to buy tix had it even worse.

I mentioned the other day that the big buzz at Telluride was about Jason Reitman's film Juno, which sneak previewed at Telluride before heading to Toronto. The biggest indicator of Juno being a hit, aside from it being the film everyone was talking about in line, on the gondola, and in the coffee shop, was that it had not one, but two TBA slots on Monday. Sunday's TBA saw over 200 passholders turned away, so it's a good thing they added two more. The first Juno TBA Monday sold out again, and while I wasn't at the Galaxy for the final screening, I'd bet it was pretty packed as well. Good news also for Tamara Jenkins, whose film The Savages, starring Telluride fave Laura Linney (a tributee a couple years ago) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, sold out the 600-seater The Palm, with (so I hear) well over 200 passholders turned away. Both films will screen at Toronto, so check them out.

What lies beneath the surface of life in a picturesque town, where mothers gather with their children at a neighborhood park, the town pool is the center of summer social life, and married couples lead what appear to be perfectly normal, happy lives with their families? What secrets hide beneath the facade of these seemingly idyllic lives? In Todd Field's Little Children, adapted with author Tom Perotta from his novel of the same name, people's lives intersect in unexpected and even dangerous ways, and nothing is quite as it seems.

Sarah (Kate Winslet) is a stay-at-home mom with an almost-PhD in English Lit. She is mired in deep unhappiness, almost an extended case of postpartum depression. Sarah chose to stay home with daughter Lucy, who is about three when we meet them, and she refuses to even consider child care; she's doing the stay-at-home mom thing, it seems, because it's the "right" thing to do, not because it's what she really wants. Sarah's depression and misery over the life she's found herself trapped in prevents her from really connecting with Lucy, this "unknowable little person" who is looking to her for love and nurturing. Sarah, to be blunt, is not good at the art of being a stay-at-home-mom -- and the other moms at the park let her know it in those subtle and insidious ways women use to attack each other.

Telluride Film Festival doesn't invite press, and it doesn't announce its lineup until the day before it starts. So with the projectors ready to roll tomorrow, Variety finally has a look at the upcoming weekend's slate.

"We probably have more world premieres of American features that we've ever had," says festival co-director Tom Luddy. They'll include: the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line; Everything is Illuminated, Liev Schreiber's adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel; and Ang Lee's gay cowboy epic Brokeback Mountain (which is also screening in Venice this week). Also on the slate are Michael Haneke's Cannes winner Cache, and tributes to Mickey Rooney, Laurie Anderson, and Merian C. Cooper (including a screening of his version of King Kong). I'm most upset to be missing "Sacred Monsters", a Peter Bogdanovich program to be presented by the filmmaker/Turner Classic Movies spokesman himself.