What the Venice film festival lacks in star power this year it hopes to make up for with an unusually young list of directors and the appearance of some of Hollywood’s more enigmatic figures.
With the irrepressible Quentin Tarantino heading the jury that hands out the coveted Golden Lion at the end of the September 1-11 [...]

Thai film “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” won the coveted Palme d’Or for best picture at the Cannes film festival Sunday.
The mystical exploration of themes related to reincarnation as a well-to-do farmer confronts his imminent death was directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The director, who has won other prizes in Cannes before, said during [...]

In “Fair Game,” Doug Liman mostly avoids delivering a political treatise.
Instead, he strips the Valerie Plame affair down to its essential elements: the bare facts of the case, the uneasy mix of the public and private lives of a D.C.-area family where Mom is a spy and the life-changing upheaval — including a marital rift [...]

Berlin and the Internet have been abuzz with rumors of a Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro-Lars Von Trier collaboration — and, at least for the time being, they appear to be true.
The idea behind the project is similar to the film “The Five Obstructions” that Von Trier and Danish helmer Jorgen Leth made in 2003. In [...]

Mike Starr has done his share of mob movies. The veteran character actor and onetime Chicagoan starred in the local “Osso Bucco” and has done supporting turns in “Goodfellas” and dozens of features and TV shows.
When the young filmmakers of Beverly Ridge Pictures approached him in 2007 to co-star in their take on the genre, [...]

Learn about movie producing to make your own movies

The starkest picture to emerge from the opening days of this year’s Sundance Film Festival may be of an independent film business forced to stretch in untested directions because its old distribution model no longer works.
Standard operating procedure over the years at Sundance, the cinematic bazaar now under way in this resort town, has been simple: show [...]

Only a few years ago, a first-time filmmaker might bring a good movie or fresh idea to the Sundance Film Festival and, simply because they made it into the event, walk away with a paycheck. But not anymore.
Sundance, the top U.S. gathering for independent film, headed into the second-half of its 10-day run on Tuesday with [...]

The snow is piling up in Park City, Utah, almost as fast as the Sundance Film Festival’s unsold movies—especially among the festival’s most prominent titles. But a number of smaller, more personal films, along with one low-budget genre title — are beginning to emerge as the talk of Park City.
The Ryan Reynolds thriller “Buried” screened very [...]

When Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, came to the Sundance Film Festival here this week, it wasn’t movies on his mind, it was education — your kids’ education.
A new documentary, “Waiting For Superman,” by director Davis Guggenheim (”An Inconvenient Truth“) looks at what Gates and Guggenheim say is a U.S. public school system [...]