We are delighted to learn that we were selected “Critics of the Naughts” by IFC.com. “Naughts” doesn’t mean naughty, or that our efforts are for naught; it just refers to the decade of the 00s, now ending. So our thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz, filmmaker and film critic extraordinary, for his generous essay about our [...]

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/dubai-skips/ http://gizmodo.com/5413109/the-burj-dubai-just-cant-stop-getting-struck-by-lightning Dubai Requests Jubilee http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574557453620655942.html Dubai World Seeks Debt Standstill “This...

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see Jim Sheridan's Brothers this week. But when I was co-hosting the Show Me Your Titles podcast, Cathy and I dedicated a full episode to Danish film-maker Susanne Bier. Bier's tremendous body of...

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web: Words Without Borders, the international sci-fi edition (Stanisław Lem, Polish speculative fiction, Hiroshi Yamamoto) & Seamus Cooper on how respectable HP Lovecraft has become (via Bookslut) & What Bolaño Read & Five Dials...

If you haven't seen the Main Street show at Space15Twenty, Saturday is the last day. It's a perfect opportunity to pick up the DVD compilation which is finally finished and available at the gallery. It will be at Family next week - I'll take some photos of it and put them on the blog soon. If you pre-bought a copy at the gallery already they'll be sent out Friday. On Saturday Girls are playing a free show in the gallery courtyard at 3PM, plus a bunch of DJs, so what else can you ask for? What a great day you will have!

Two Jell-o lovers share a romantic interlude in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Kristin here: Back in early 2007, I posted an entry about the supposed over-supply of animated films due for release that year. I realize that journalists have to find topics to fill pages. That year���one topic...

DECEMBER 4 — HERBERT READ Distinguished British anarchist art critic. DECEMBER 4, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS Nuremberg, Germany: KRIS KRINGLES’ FAIR. ALSO ON DECEMBER 4 IN HISTORY… 1122 — Poet of wine, women and song Omar Khayyam dies. 1866 — Painter Wassily Kandinsky born, Moscow, Russia. 1875 —...

Although as I write this its Tomatometer is at 89%, Jason Reitman's Up in the Air is something of a Rorschach test for critics, with some finding the film to be both canny and empathetic, a Hollywood picture calibrated for the emotional temperature of a country with a 10% unemployment rate. Others see its Hollywood sheen and evocation of the family as obviating the economic reality it is set against. (J. Hoberman of the Village Voice writes: "... a satire unsullied by anger, Up in the Air floats above the pain." I am solidly in the "pro" camp, feeling that Reitman has worked within the Hollywood style to create a nuanced, often quite melancholy, and far from facile portrait of numbed...

Paul Rachman, whose feature documentary American Hardcore, premiered at Sundance in 2006 and then was sold to Sony Classics, penned a 17-page chapter of Chris Gore's Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide. Here are some of the tips listed in the chapter: - Your festival preparation starts the day you find out you have been accepted. If you are not working nonstop from that moment until your World Premiere, then you are most likely leaving important things undone. - The most important thing about your major festival world premiere is to keep it that way—a premiere. Do not start sending the entire film to potential distributors, exhibitors or press; they will ask you for this, but it will most...