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Jessica Hausner with Anne-Katrin Titze on Sylvie Testud’s Christine, Léa Seydoux’s Maria, Bruno Todeschini’s Kuno, and Gilette Barbier’s Frau Hartl in Lourdes: “I was thinking about the story of Heidi [by Johanna Spyri].”

In the first installment with Jessica Hausner on three of her feature films before her latest, the bewitching Club Zero (European Film Award Best Original Score to Markus Binder), we start the conversation with Lourdes, costumes, as always, designed by Tanja Hausner, cinematography by Martin Gschlacht, sound design by Erik Mischijew, and production design by Katharina Wöppermann (Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s Women Without Men).

Kuno (Bruno Todeschini) with Christine (Sylvie Testud), Frau Hartl (Gilette Barbier) and Cécile (Elina Löwensohn)

Maria (Léa Seydoux), a newcomer to the...

Shirin Neshat with Matt Dillon and cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian on the set of Land Of Dreams, co-directed with Shoja Azari, screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Azari Photo: Giulia Theodoli

In the second instalment with Shirin Neshat we discuss the Sam Shepard look for Matt Dillon as Alan, Sheila Vand’s compulsive obsessive traits for Simin, Isabella Rossellini’s love of animals and her peacock screeches as Jane. Anna Gunn’s Betty and Nancy, William Moseley’s Mark, Luis Buñuel films, and the Jean-Claude Carrière narrative of how and why they are collecting dreams also came up. When music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman joined us, he inquired about Land of Dreams composer Michael Brook, the story about Little Pedro, the paintings in the film, and remarked on a Site Santa Fe Patti Smith concert.

Shirin Neshat with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze: “When we were doing the costume for Matt Dillon,...

Land of Dreams Review — Land of Dreams (2021) Film Review from the 21st Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Shoja Azari and Shirin Neshat, written by Shoja Azari and Jean-Claude Carriere and starring Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, William Moseley, Isabella Rossellini, Anna Gunn, Christopher McDonald, Robin Bartlett, Joaquim de Almeida, Gaius [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Land Of Dreams: A Bold Film That Works Best as an Artistic Experiment [Tribeca 2022]...

Exclusive: Vertical Entertainment has acquired North American rights to the political satire Land of Dreams, directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, which is making its North American premiere in the Spotlight Narrative section of the Tribeca Film Festival in June. The global indie distributor has slated the film for a day-and-date theatrical release in 10 of the top 20 markets—including in Los Angeles and New York—this fall. (Watch a new trailer unveiled today by the company above.)

Set in a near-future America which has closed its borders and become more insular than ever, the story follows Simin (Sheila Vand), an Iranian American woman on a journey to discover the core of what it means to be a free American. Simin works for the Census Bureau—the most important government agency of her time. In efforts to understand and control its populous, the government has begun a program to record the citizens’ dreams.

Frédéric Boyer on Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s Official Competition, starring Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, and Oscar Martínez: “Extraordinary! It’s like a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn type of slapstick” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second installment with Tribeca Film Festival Artistic Director Frédéric Boyer we discuss Joachim Back’s Corner Office, John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven, David Frankel’s Jerry and Marge Go Large, Paul Dektor’s American Dreamer, Andrew Bujalski’s There, There, Annette K Olesen’s A Matter Of Trust, Kyra Sedgwick’s Space Oddity, Katie Holmes’s Alone Together, Peter Hengl’s Family Dinner, Clara Stern’s Breaking The Ice, and Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn’s Official Competition (Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Oscar...

Tribeca Film Festival Artistic Director Frédéric Boyer with Anne-Katrin Titze (in Dôen) on Tessa Louise-Salomé’s The Wild One on Jack Garfein, narrated by Willem Dafoe: “He’s a creator of the Actors Studio in L.A. with Paul Newman and he was a mentor of Ben Gazzara and he is also a survivor of the Holocaust.”

In the first instalment with Tribeca Film Festival Artistic Director Frédéric Boyer we discuss the success of the 20th anniversary edition being back on the big screen and some of the selections of this year’s program.

Frédéric Boyer on Lior Ashkenazi in Moshe Rosenthal’s Karaoke: “He’s wonderful! He is typically a man, he plays the macho and it’s cool!” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, Moshe Rosenthal, Del Kathryn Barton (Blaze with Simon Baker), Becky Hutner (Fashion Reimagined on Amy Powney’s Mother Of Pearl), Alexandre...

Having isolated a film enthusiast on a North Sea lighthouse island in 2021, this year’s Göteborg Film Festival, Scandinavia’s biggest movie-tv event, looks set to stage another bold metaphor for film consumption, subjecting audiences at three different movie screenings to mass hypnosis.

Dubbed The Hypnotic Cinema, the strand’s titles chosen for the singular experiment are Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 Cannes Jury Prize winner “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton; “Land of Dreams,” from Iran’s Venice Silver Lion winners Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (“Women Without Men”) starring Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon and Isabella Rossellini; and Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s “Speak No Evil,” slated to world premiere at this month’s Sundance Festival.

Before each film, a hypnotist will perform a mass hypnosis from the main stage at the Stora Teatern in Göteborg, the festival announced Tuesday. Transforming the audience’s state of mind in accordance with the mood and theme of the film,...

The pop-up initiative showcases independent cinema within the framework of the Diriyah Biennale.

Burgeoning Saudi exhibitor Muvi Cinemas and content production and distribution company Telfaz11 have launched joint pop-up venture Wadi Cinema aimed at fostering arthouse cinema-going in the country.

Unfolding within Saudi Arabia’s first-ever art biennale, running in the historic city of Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh from December 16 to March 11, the initiative consists of a temporary cinema and a programme of recent arthouse titles.

It opens on Thursday (December 23) with a screening of Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania,...

The Iranian-born artist’s film, co-directed by Shoja Azari, looks sweet and sunny – but its freeze-dried sensibility eventually grates

Simin Hakak is a headstrong young woman from Iran – by way of Cincinnati – who works as a dreamcatcher for the US census bureau. That is to say, she travels door-to-door asking nonplussed citizens to recount their most vivid, recent subconscious ramble. Simin explains that this is a government initiative to safeguard their security. In fact it’s all part of a deep-state plot to control people’s brains and hard-wire their fantasies. Remember that the next time a census taker comes calling.

Written and directed by Iranian-born artists Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, Land of Dreams arrives as a piece of hyper-real candyfloss with a gentle satirical edge, like a sweeter, sunnier version of a Yorgos Lanthimos film. It bounces busy Simin through an archetypal Americana where she interviews a brash suburban couple,...

The American future presented in Land of Dreams is not, unfortunately, all that far-fetched. In this beguiling political satire, directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, computer screens and cellphones are sleek and sexy, xenophobic attitudes persist in the name of a misguided nationalism, and the state still investigates its citizens for vague national security purposes. If it weren’t for the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau collects dreams — yes, dreams — it would be easy to mistake the film’s representation for reality.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Horizons sidebar, Land of Dreams was written by ...

The American future presented in Land of Dreams is not, unfortunately, all that far-fetched. In this beguiling political satire, directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, computer screens and cellphones are sleek and sexy, xenophobic attitudes persist in the name of a misguided nationalism, and the state still investigates its citizens for vague national security purposes. If it weren’t for the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau collects dreams — yes, dreams — it would be easy to mistake the film’s representation for reality.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Horizons sidebar, Land of Dreams was written by ...

Land of Dreams directors Shoja Azari and Shirin Neshat with Isabella Rossellini and cinematographer Ghasem Ebrahimian Photo: Giulia Theodoli

Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s highly imaginative Land Of Dreams, based on a story by Shirin Neshat, screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Shoja Azari, shot by Ghasem Ebrahimian, stars Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, and William Moseley with Isabella Rossellini, Christopher McDonald, Anna Gunn, Joaquim de Almeida, Gaius Charles, Robin Bartlett, James Cady, Nicole Ansari-Cox, Luce Rains, and Rebecca Comerford.

Shirin Neshat with Anne-Katrin Titze on Land of Dreams: “We started with Jean-Claude Carrière and it was a very complex, unusual script.”

Land Of Dreams is dedicated to Jean-Claude Carrière. It is his last feature film screenplay credit. Jean-Claude Carrière has three Screenplay Oscar nominations. Carrière also co-wrote Volker Schlöndorff’s Oscar winner The Tin Drum and in 2015, received an honorary Oscar. Jean-Claude Carrière died on February 8, 2021 at the...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s satirical, surrealistic film “Land of Dreams,” which opens the Horizons Extra section of the Venice Film Festival. The filmmakers won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for their first feature film, “Women Without Men.”

“Land of Dreams” stars Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, William Moseley and Isabella Rossellini. Beta Cinema has sales rights worldwide, except for the U.S., which is being handled by UTA.

The screenplay is by the late Jean-Claude Carrière and Azari. Carrière, who died earlier this year, was Luis Buñuel’s screenwriting partner on six of Buñuel’s films. Carrière won an Oscar for the short film “The Anniversary,” and was Oscar nominated for Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “That Obscure Object of Desire,” as well as Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The programme for the 2021 Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Campion, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michelangelo Frammartino, Pablo Larraín, Paul Schrader, Ridley Scott, and more.Parallel MothersCOMPETITIONParallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Ana Lily Amirpour)Un Autre Monde (Stephane Brize)The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)America LatinaL’Evenement (Audrey Diwan)Official CompetitionThe Hole (Michelangelo Frammartino)Sundown (Michel Franco)Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli)The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal)Spencer (Pablo Larrain)Freaks Out (Gabriele Mainetti)Qui Rido Io (Mario Martone)On The Job: The Missing 8 (Erik Matti)Leave No Traces (Jan P. Matuszyński)Captain Volkonogov EscapedThe Card Counter (Paul Schrader)The Hand of God (Paolo Sorrentino)Reflection (Valentyn Vasyanovych)The Box (Lorenzo Vigas)Out Of COMPETITIONFeaturesDune (Denis Villeneuve)Il Bambino Nascosto (Roberto Andò)Les Choses Humaines (Yvan Attal)Ariaferma (Leonardo Di Costanzo)Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green...

Taking place September 1 through 11, the Venice Film Festival has now unveiled its lineup, after a few teases of what it contains (the opening night selection of Madres Paralelas by Pedro Almodovar and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune). Among the selections are Jane Campion’s The Power of a Dog, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter, Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, and Edgar Wright’s The Last Night in Soho will premiere there, along with new shorts by Radu Jude and Tsai Ming-liang.

Check out the line below for the festival that will feature 50% capacity at screenings.

Venezia 78 – Competition

Madres Paralelas, dir: Pedro Almodovar

Mona Lisa And The Blood Moon, dir: Ana Lily Amirpour

Un Autre Monde, dir: Stéphane Brizé

The Power Of The Dog,...

Volker Schlöndorff on Jean-Claude Carrière: “Early Sixties, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Delphine Seyrig, those were the stars in our sky, when we first met, about 55 years ago, Jean-Claude 30, me 23, not working together but working on the same picture: Viva Maria!” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Jean-Claude Carrière, who died on February 8 at the age of 89, had three films in the works that he co-wrote, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s Land Of Dreams, Louis Garrel’s The Crusade, and José Luis López-Linares’ documentary Le Mystère Goya. In 2018, at the New York Film Festival press conference for Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity's Gate, starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh, Carrière said: “There is a love story between painting and movies, because the painting is still and doesn't move. And movies move. It's a love story that goes back to the prehistoric caves when the first painters tried to give the illusion of movement.

Austrian producer Martin Gschlacht has been an active proponent of Austrian (and eventually Iranian) cinema since the late 1990s, and has quietly amassed a coterie of regular collaborators, including Jessica Hausner, Götz Spielmann and directing duo Shirin Neshat & Shoja Azari (including their titles Women Without Men in 2009 and Looking for Oum Kulthum in 2017).

Notably, Gschlacht started out as and is perhaps more notable as a cinematographer, beginning his career with Hausner, lensing her early short Inter-View (1999) and all of her subsequent features, from her 2001 debut Lovely Rita to her latest English language debut, Little Joe, which finally sees the Austrian director ascend into the Cannes competition in 2019.…...

‪Susanna Nicchiarelli's Nico, 1988‬ star ‪Trine Dyrholm‬: "It's so important to have such complex female characters on screen." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

"This is Berlin, my darling, it's burning," says a mother to her daughter. The child is to become The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol icon known as Nico. Susanna Nicchiarelli's Nico, 1988, a highlight of the Tribeca Film Festival and the Horizons Award Best Film winner at last year's Venice International Film Festival, stars an outstanding Trine Dyrholm as Christa Päffgen (Nico's birth name). John Gordon Sinclair is her hapless manager Richard, Thomas Trabacchi music collaborator Domenico, Sandor Funtek is Christa's lost son Ari, Anamaria Marinca is violinst Sylvia, and Karina Fernandez is Laura.

Nico (Trine Dyrholm) with her son Ari (Sandor Funtek): "It's a universal film. It's a film about a mother, a woman, an artist, a war generation, a human being."

Nicchiarelli's extraordinary film, produced by...

Director and artist Shirin Neshat returns to Venice after her debut feature Women Without Men won the Silver Lion in 2009. Her new film Looking for Oum Kulthum has its world premiere in Venice Days, an independent sidebar modeled after Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, before making its North American debut in Toronto.

Neshat made the movie with her frequent collaborator, Shoja Azari, about the plight of an Iranian director living in exile who embarks upon making a film about the legendary Egyptian singer. Kulthum, with her incredible vocal style and range, is considered one of the greatest Arabic singers of all...

Stationed above a busy corner on Canal Street, the studio of the Iranian filmmaker and artist Shirin Neshat whirred with several working film editors and assistants upon our arrival. Neshat is best known for her black-and-white cinematic films addressing gender issues within Islamic culture. She shares the space with her partner Shoja Azari, a fellow filmmaker and frequent collaborator. Conversations in Farsi and Italian were shooting back and forth among the crew. “We are very lucky because our studio is like a community. We’re all close friends and we’re together all the time basically,” said Neshat. Most of the studio was dedicated to editing except for Neshat’s photographic and calligraphic work area, which took over a corner of the room. Handwriting sheathed many of the figures in the photographs. Neshat has been busy with plans for three major museum exhibitions — the first opened in Doha this past...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"Game of Death" (2011)

Directed by Giorgio Serafini

Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Quite possibly Wesley Snipes' last film for a long, long time, this action flick features the "Passenger 57" star as a CIA agent who is betrayed by his employer after he's deployed to take out an arms dealer in Detroit. "Grindhouse" star Zoe Bell is onhand to provide backup.

"Celestial Films: Lady Hermit" (1971)

Directed by Meng Hua Ho

Released by Funimation

An aspiring female kung fu warrior searches for an elusive master who turns out to pretend to be a servant in this Shaw Brothers produced action flick.

"Daylight Robbery" (2008)

Directed by Paris Leonti

Released by Well Go USA

Paris Leonti's heist flick involves a group of misfits who plot to rob the London Exchange of the loot in their underground vault.

"Disconnect" (2011)

Directed by Robin Christian...

Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men is the latest in a long line of great Iranian movies

The first decade of the 21st century has been an extraordinary time for Iranian film-makers, starting with joint Caméra d'Or wins for Hassan Yektapanah's Djomeh and Bahman Ghobadi's A Time for Drunken Horses at the 2000 Cannes film festival. Since then we have been treated to such wildly differing visions as Rafi Pitts's haunting It's Winter, with its oddly epic sense of domestic turmoil, and Jafar Panahi's Offside, arguably the best football movie ever made. In 2008 Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis picked up an Oscar nomination, while in 2010 Cannes favourite Abbas Kiarostami steered Juliette Binoche to a best actress award in Certified Copy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the problems of film-making in Iran (Panahi was unable to sit on the jury at Cannes this year because he was in prison for allegedly...

Exiled artist Shirin Neshat's first film is about the lives of four women in her native Iran – but it won't get past the country's censors

Shirin Neshat sits in the cafe of a London park enthusing about pirate DVDs. The artist and first-time film director is unconcerned with the effect on ticket sales, instead praising the ingenuity of black market sellers who have made illegal copies of her film, Women Without Men.

"My sister managed to buy five copies in a store, with a new cover and everything," she tells me. "She sent someone to buy some more, but the guy said, 'Lady, we have already sold 500.' I was really happy." The store was in Iran, where the film is set, and the DVDs are likely to be the only way anyone in the country will see her film. Neshat is confident it will never get past the censors.

Greenberg (15)

(Noah Baumbach, 2010, Us) Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh. 107 mins

Usually Ben Stiller is the guy you like in the movie, and the guy you laugh at. Here he's bravely subdued and unsympathetic – a self-absorbed slacker with extreme empathy issues – but you can still laugh at him. After a while, you might even like him. Drifting back to La, he picks at old relationship wounds and opens up fresh ones (with the winningly pathetic Gerwig) in a charming character study with indie values (and soundtrack) that under-achievers of a certain age will relate to.

Brooklyn's Finest (18)

(Antoine Fuqua, 2009, Us) Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke. 132 mins

Breaking news: law enforcement in the sketchier areas of New York is sometimes quite difficult. This three-pronged assault hammers the cliches home relentlessly, self-importantly detailing the trials of its compromised lawmen as if it's saying something new. Or something at all.

Women Without Men

Starring Arita Shahrzad, Shabnam Tolouei, Pegah Ferydoni, and Orsi Toth

Directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari

Unrated

If you're 30 or younger, you don't know an Iran that has a lot of progressive rights for anyone, perhaps women least of all. The only Iran you identify with is most likely the contemporary one, which is an odd choice of words since there is so little contemporary about 21st century institutional mores in Iran.

We saw a revolution unfold on television in 1979, a deeply fundamentalist uprising that led to the 444-day capture of 52 Americans by Iranian students. But it was only the second massive revolution in that country in 30 years.

The first took place in 1953, when Iran was so much closer to a western culture than it is today. Much of that had to do with the Shah, who was nothing if not conciliatory to the west. But he was also,...

Directors Shirley Barrett and Yonfan (Hong Kong) have joined the jury for the Sydney Film Festival’s Official Competition.

They will judge the 12 films under the direction of jury president Jan Chapman, working with the director of the Sundance Film Festival, John Cooper, and a fifth jury member yet to be announced.

Barrett’s latest project, South Solitary, will premiere on June 2, opening the festival. It will be released by Icon on July 29.

The director’s 1996 Love Serenade will also screen, as part of the Deluxe/Kodak film preservation program (June 12).

Yonfan’s Prince of Tears - Hong Kong’s entry for the 2010 Academy Awards – will also premiere at the festival on June 9.

The wining film will be announced on closing night, June 14.

The 12 films are:

• Four Lions, Dir Christopher Morris

• Heartbeats, Dir-Scr Xavier Dolan

• How I Ended This Summer, Dir-Scr Alexej Popogrebski

• If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle,...

By Harvey Karten - "Women Without Men" is a visually enchanting piece, an accomplishment all the more because it was photographed and directed by first-timer Shirin Neshat. While written by Shoja Azari, the film is based on a best-selling novella by Shahrnush Parsipur, who spent years in one of Iran's worst prisons because of the political content of her manuscript. Neshat appears more concerned with putting out a painterly picture than with creating energetic performances from her able cast, given the long takes, the selective use of color amid mostly black-and-white images, and the emphasis on principals as symbolic aspects of the status of women in the Iran of 1953. "Women without Men" is a chick-flick but hardly the kind that the typical American 20-something, BlackBerry-addicted, Starbucks-caffeinated woman would go for. This is Art with a capital A, which is fine in that there's nothing here that resembles an American rom-com but on the other hand,...

The annual New Directors / New Films showcase organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center has selected as one of this year’s films Amer, the feature film debut by Montreal transgressive filmmaking duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. The film will screen twice during the program:

April 2

9:15 p.m.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

April 3

2:00 p.m.

Museum of Modern Art

So far, 2010 is looking to be a huge year for Cattet and Forzani. Prior to Nd/Nf in April, Amer will screen in March at both the Boston Underground Film Festival and at SXSW. This is already after having a very successful 2009, where the film played at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival and has won awards at the Lund Fantastisk Film Festival, Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, Festival Nouveau Cinema de Montreal and more.

Amer is a tribute to the...

As I said in Toronto and again at the Hof Flm Festival, until there is parity between male and female directors I will continue to look at women directors. I heard the other day that the number of women directors is actually decreasing in the television world.

Here are some quick facts on Sundance this year:

If you include shorts- 51 women directors are represented at Sundance.

In the Premiere section, out of 16 films 7 have women directors.

John Cooper, Director, Sundance Film Festival, brought it to my attention that "Low Budget is dominated by the boys still but that is changing with Lynn Shelton, Katie Aselton etc stepping up. Even there, many have women producers. I have a hunch in the indie creative producer world women dominate. Like I said, that is just a hunch I have never done a study."

Sundance Film Festival is showing approximately 115 features. Of those 25 (20%) are...

Yesterday we got the list for the films playing in competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and today we get the rest of the films that will be featured and there are quite a few that make 2010 look much stronger based on pedigree alone than I have seen in quite some time. Variety has a big write-up detailing the categories and more on the festival right here, but I am just going to offer up the titles and let you sort it all out.

The titles already in the RopeofSilicon database are linked.

Premieres

All films are from the United States unless otherwise noted Abel (Mexico-u.S.), the directorial debut of actor Diego Luna, written by Luna and Agusto Mendoza, about a peculiar young boy who, as he blurs reality and fantasy, takes over the responsibilities of a family man in his father's absence. With Jose Maria Yazpik, Karina Gidi,...

The Sundance Film Festival's competition lineup for 2010, announced Wednesday, might demand that audiences wear their serious caps. But the out-of-competition selections allow programmers and viewers to cut loose a little.

The 53 films that populate this year's Premieres, Next, Spotlight, Park City at Midnight and New Frontier sections run the gamut from the cosmically experimental to the star-studded and silly. There is indeed something for everyone at this year's event, which runs Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

As usual, Premieres collects work involving the industry's higher-profile talent, none more so than John Wells' feature directorial debut, "The Company Men," which stars Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. Mexican actor Diego Luna's directorial debut, "Abel," will screen, as will Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Jack Goes Boating."

Michael Winterbottom has the rare distinction of having two films in...

• [Pierre-Alexandre Despatis suffers for his cinema. Now covering his second edition, our official festival reporter and multi-function human cyborg will provide us the sights (plenty of cool pics!), the sounds, the reviews and the occasional interviews of the still very young 5th edition of the Tribeca film festival. Below are some of Pierre-Alexandre’s reviews in easy to read, insightful capsule form. Enjoy!] WINDOWSSomewhere between experimental cinema and narrative film is a little and strange film called Windows. The film is composed of 9 stories revolving around ... windows. Each of the stories is shown in one single continuous shot. Yes, this could be a rather boring experience but we spectators are surprisingly active during the films, as we're trying to figure out what is going on based on the clues that gradually get revealed via a slow-moving camera. Certain elements of the films are somewhat annoying--for instance in one of the short films the characters in the background have sex without totally giving themselves to the scene and sometimes the camera movements are shaky and unstable. Despite such small glitches-- Shoja Azari manages to add some artiness to the film, each of the 9 stories is compelling enough to give an end result that is both pleasant and challenging. Windows has something for everybody,

...