Fun screenplay with a Uma Thurman custom fit for this role.

I've got low expectations for this picture -- but Kaye proved with docu Lake of Fire that he still has a voice worth considering.

"The Turin Horse," a new movie from Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr that will use the story of a farmer and his horse as an existential metaphor.

You can disagree with his viewpoint, his editing practices and how he positions his docs as first person accounts, but Moore’s commentary on American politics almost always, -- provides for good debate and laughs.

I’m very curious to see how Akin, a filmmaker known for working with darker themes, deals with lighter fair but with the same admiration for how cultures, and the sexes clash.

The Day the Earth Stood Still came at a time when North America’s psyche was shaken by the threat of communist infiltration, Nuclear War and the beginnings of an Arms race, and the film does a beautiful job of expressing the fears of an entire nation with its cautionary message.

I’m not sure what to make of this – but this year Top 20 batch of film’s have death as a focal point in the plot or use bereavement thematically: death of a dream, death of a soul, death out of defiance and death of a culture, society and way of life. I don’t really have a fascination with death, but I’ve noticed that my own mortality and the eventual passing of my loved ones seem to have embedded itself in some aspects of my daily routine.

Abdellatif Kechiche’s third film had such on long-lasting affect on me that I came for a second “helping” weeks after….I also rushed to my nearest Arab restaurant for a generous helping of couscous. I place this at my number one slot because it does everything right – plus the filmmaker allows the film to breath with contextual settings of a salty seaside town and the rich array of slice of life characters coating the rather simplistic storyline with honesty and intimacy.

I was shell-shocked by the hard to watch brutal nature of the film and it was McQueen’s manner in which he used the medium of film to near perfection with his superb play on the visual and aural cues.

So while I wasn’t totally convinced by his cinema, this changed when I finally got to see what is perhaps the most beautiful story visually captured on film this year (it was actually a 2007 film, had a week release I think at MoMA in the Fall, and gets a release at Film Forum next week) comes from Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and his DOP Alexis Zabe.

Truth is, I consider myself a fan of Jia Zhang-ke's work despite having only seen a pair of his films from a filmography that must be at a five or six count.

Two films that made their mark on indieland in 08’are Ballast and Frozen River. I didn’t care much for the later, but on the short list of impressive directorial debuts this year, Lance Hammer’s drama reminded me how a narrative and the secrets that it holds can be dispelled like the effects of one of those cough drops.

My favorite book-to-film adaptation is this import from Italy -- a film that gets points for style, design of parallel storylines and Matteo Garrone’s ability to make the best out his locations and to visually express the notion of life as something that easily goes to waste.

What is so surreal about the film is how authentic it is, and what is fascinating about Laurent Cantet’s grip is that a 2 plus hour film is the sort of film that “doesn’t feel like two hours”.

Boldly going where no other “Kaufman” film has gone before – it might not have the visual flair of Kaufman-based material adaptations Being John Malkovich, ESOTSM and Adaptation, but I was floored by the originality of the script, the scope and size of the ideas that perforated the screen.

I caught Ramin Bahrani’s sophomore film back in 2007 at the Director’s Fortnight section in Cannes – it confirmed what we witnessed with his first film Man Push Cart: sometimes the best film narrative come in small packages.

The perfect companion piece to another film that is in my top 10 – (hint: the Yangtze and the consequences of the dam project are prominent themes and backdrop to both of films), my favorite documentary film of the year (so far) is Up the Yangtze.

The Dark Knight fails by its own standards. It wants to be realistic and taken seriously, and yet if audiences do so the film self-destructs.

Both Marley & Me and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button set records this Christmas. The latter’s one-day tally of $12 million would become the second biggest Christmas day opening of all time. That said, the one with the dog made $14.7 million that same day and you know what that means. It means that people like Jennifer Aniston better than they like Brad Pitt.

'...the ingenious mesh of docu form and animation makes this one of the revelation films from this year’s Cannes film festival."

The thing that generally attracts me to film is the central character, or in this case the two of them. I find that I've been drawn to characters who are in some way lost and trying to find their way through life, and that's been the case with all the films I've made. The strange thing is that my first movie was intimate, and this movie was intimate, and the movie I've made since this was also intimate, but the two movies I made in between I was much more concerned with style, and much more concerned with using the bells and whistles of moviemaking.

I was a screenwriter doing silly instruction films for TV but I wanted to get out and they said you can't unless you go to the army therapist and tell them everything you have been through during your army service. I did that and did ten sessions and was pretty much amazed at the end to hear my story for the first time. Not by the story but the fact that I never heard it before. It was amazing then came the dog dreams of my friend and I started to talk to other friends and decided I wanted to make a film about it.

So to have everyone putting on an affecting German accent... we have an international cast: American actors, Dutch, German, British. To have everyone approximating German accents when in reality they're supposed to be speaking German, I promise after the first twenty minutes, you'd be sick of it. It would ultimately sound silly, and it would distract from the drive of the plot. So the decision was made pretty quickly.

Adapted from the landmark novel by Richard Yates, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is an incisive portrait of an American marriage seen through the eyes of Frank (three-time Academy Award® nominee Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (five-time Academy Award® nominee Kate Winslet) Wheeler. Yates’ story of 1950’s America poses a question that has been reverberating through modern relationships ever since: can two people break away from the ordinary without breaking apart?

I wasn’t very. I think a lot of guys my age had about an 8-month romance with wrestling when they were kids. It was during the “hulk-a-mania” craze. I went to one match at Madison Square where Hulk was the bad guy. He was against Tony Atlas, and I remember the Hulk trying to throw Atlas, but missing, giving Atlas the opportunity to pull Hulk’s pants off. I was so excited I lost my voice for about three months.

They last worked together on the brilliant Traffic, and here Del Toro is given all the autonomy here to work in what is two different films on Che (not performance wise but director style). In this year’s most under appreciated performance, Del Toro loses himself within the role.

She got her start as a secondary player in All or Nothing (2002) and followed Marsan in Vera Drake, but in 2008, Leigh allowed Sally Hawkins to flourish in a role that showed her comedic and romantic muscles.

Following up with his supporting role in Leigh's Vera Drake, Eddie Marsan brings to the screen an honest portrayal of a possessive, isolated and deeply hurt man which he simply didn't get enough cred for.

In A Christmas Tale, Desplechin works once again with two of his favorites: Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos. This time out, it is Amalric who gets the more of the limelight and of course he finds himself in an unlikable role of an adult son with a major chip on his shoulder. Amalric previously worked with the director on My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument and Kings & Queen.

Whenever the Coen bros. need to cast an idiot – they look to George Clooney to fill the shoes. Completing his trilogy of dummies with O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, Clooney provided comic relief in the zany role of a serial dater who has every reason to be paranoid.