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Looking back on this still-young century makes clear that 2007 was a major time for cinematic happenings — and, on the basis of this retrospective, one we’re not quite through with ten years on. One’s mind might quickly flash to a few big titles that will be represented, but it is the plurality of both festival and theatrical premieres that truly surprises: late works from old masters, debuts from filmmakers who’ve since become some of our most-respected artists, and mid-career turning points that didn’t necessarily announce themselves as such at the time. Join us as an assembled team, many of whom were coming of age that year, takes on their favorites.

It’s some time after midnight, and you’re riding the bus. The rehearsed movements from here to bed are already running through your head: ten or eleven more blocks, fifty steps to the building door, up two flights of stairs,...

I entered the BFI IMAX, the largest and loudest screen in the United Kingdom, at 18:20. At a shade after 18:40, Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room began. About two hours later I stumbled, disorientated, mumbling and drooling, onto the sandy banks of the Thames.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned; Guy Maddin himself had introduced the film, off-handedly joking that what we were about to see a) has the potential to induce aneurysms, b) that he’d be surprised if there was anyone left by the time it was finished and c) that he himself would only dare to watch the opening scenes before skedaddling backstage.

For those unfamiliar with Guy Maddin’s work, he’s an experimental filmmaker/installation artist with inclinations towards the silent/early talkie aesthetic. His plots often dive into the surreal and the metafictional, usually feeling as if they’re written according to alien rules of narrative.

The Forbidden Room director Guy Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson

After its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Guy Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room had its international debut in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival. Together, they've made made a feverish collage of false extracts from old movies, a half forgotten, groggily recalled, dreamily regained experience of cinematic potential.

Originating from the Seances project, these self-described fragments are more like truncated (or over-extended) skits riffing from the conventions, memories and suggestions of Maddin's most beloved of periods in film history, the end of silence and beginning of sound: the queasy, delirious, awkward, voluptuous late 1920s and early 30s. The skits, some starring recognizable actors as grotesques (Udo Kier and Mathieu Amalric) or as Golden Era gods and goddesses (Maria de Medeiros as a woman "born to be a widow," Roy Dupuis as...

Husband-and-wife team Guy Maddin and Kim Morgan will take the hot seats at the 41st annual event, set to run in Colorado from August 29-September 1.

In keeping with the festival’s ethos, the guest directors’ six selections will be made available on opening day.

“Guy and Kim have long been a part of Telluride,” said Telluride Film Festival executive director Julie Huntsinger.

“There was no question that they were the perfect choice for this year’s festival. Their energy, knowledge and enthusiasm is a winning combination – our audience will benefit from that when their selections are unveiled at the festival.”

Maddin has won the National Society Of Film Critics Award for best experimental film twice, for Archangel in 1991 and The Heart Of The World in 2001. He also earned the Telluride Silver Medallion in 1995.

Morgan is a film, music and culture writer who has written for numerous outlets.

“We are honoured and thrilled to be guest directors at Telluride...

Anna Karenina; Taken 2; Keyhole; Hotel Transylvania; Barbara

After a sojourn away from the somewhat staid literary adaptations (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) with which he made his name, Joe Wright returns to another classic text, clearly invigorated by the audience-pleasing lessons learned on the somewhat sentimental The Soloist and the full-on action-romp Hanna. For all its flaws, his adaptation of Anna Karenina (2012, Universal, 12) is a laudably full-throttle affair, packed with unembarrassed flourishes of Russellian visual invention, theatrical daring and even dance.

Using a proscenium arch device to circumvent the problems and/or expenses of location shooting, Wright's rendering of a well-worn but still thorny narrative boasts splendidly fluid cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, a swoony score from Dario Marianelli, and an especially fine turn from Jude Law as Anna's unloved husband. That the film itself should be perhaps more cerebrally impressive than emotionally engaging is partly a result of Anna's frosty...

Decades before “The Artist,” Canadian director Guy Maddin was mining the look, feel and sound of silent cinema and early talkies for his stylish and provocative films. When “Grindhouse” directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were deliberately putting scratches and missing frames into their film to make it look like an old print from the 1970s, they were picking up tricks that Maddin was doing back in the ’90s with early films like “Careful” and “Archangel.” Maddin’s new film “Keyhole” reminds us that his aesthetic owes as much to David Lynch...

You could forgive Guy Maddin for feeling a little put out at the moment. The Canadian filmmaker has, for nearly 25 years, been faithfully paying homage to the early days of cinema with films like "Archangel," "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs" and "The Saddest Music In The World" to little commercial success, only to see "The Artist" become an awards-laden phenomenon this year. But actually (as we'll see) Maddin hasn't been paying much attention. Instead, he's been focused on his latest film, the gangster memory tale, "Keyhole," with Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini and Udo Kier, among others. Having premiered at Toronto last year, the film made its European bow at the Berlin Film Festival this week, and we were lucky enough to sit down with Maddin to discuss the new film, whether or not he's seen "The Artist," and being the coolest man in the world. "Keyhole" will next be shown at SXSW next March,...

Tina Brown, Peter Beinart, John Avlon, Michelle Goldberg, and other Daily Beast writers and contributors pick their favorite books of 2010.

Tina Brown

Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads

It takes a daring biographer to turn her sharp eye on her own life as Antonia Fraser does so movingly and beautifully in her memoir Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. It's a compelling diary of a passionate love affair, marriage, and 40-year conversation of two soul mates in the milieu of London's chattering classes.

Harvard superstar professor Niall Ferguson wrote a superb book, High Financier, that I hope every Wall Street banker is receiving along with their fat bonus checks because Siegmund Warburg was a banker with style, integrity, and a serious intellect-rare qualities these days.

Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart's The Icarus Syndrome is one of the most important books of the last...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"Gasland" (2010)

Directed by Josh Fox

Released by New Video Group

"Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"

Directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg

Released by Mpi Home Video

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" (2010)

Directed by Banksy

Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories

If you haven't caught up on the year's best documentaries in time to fill out your top 10 list, three of them will be hitting DVD shelves this week, beginning with Josh Fox's Sundance award-winning "Gasland," an exploration of the "hydraulic fracturing" going on in own backyard, a type of drilling that has spread to 34 states in the U.S. and has left a host of reservoirs of toxic waste and frequent gas explosions along the way. For something less serious, but equally compelling, there is also Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg's "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," which follows the...

Grim Prairie Tales: Doreen Girard and Irene Bindi Talk about The Kult Mania of Their Expanded Cinema Performance Winter Night

– Interview by Kier-La Janisse –

On Sunday December 12th, Austin will be host to a unique cinematic experience dreamt up by a handful of multidisciplinary lo-fi artists from the weirdest and coldest English-speaking place on earth: Winnipeg, Canada. Winter Night is a program that utilizes live music, live manipulation of 16mm and slide projectors, and Winnipeg’s rich history of Diy crafts, Aboriginal magic, heavy metal, and random violent outbursts to create an anthology of stories sure to make your spine tingle.

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Doreen, how did you become interested in slides as your primary visual medium, and what are the advantages or limitations of working with slides?

Doreen: A number of my friends are filmmakers, and I started working with slides as a way of overcoming my own technical shortcomings in terms of making film.

Be Careful, citizens of Tolzbad! Of the big budget and fan-catered product that is going to be shoveled into Walmart for the holiday season, it warms my heart to see that Zeitgeist is preparing the Quintessential Guy Maddin, a box set containing five great films of mad Canuck filmmaker that at the least, starts to approach the magnitude of the 'quintessential' moniker. While My Winnipeg, Tales from the Gimli Hospital and The Saddest Music In The World would be very nice indeed to round out the set, anyone willing to delve into the strange and wild filmography of the Canadian auteur could do worse! Careful might just be Maddin's masterwork, and is a great entry point as well. The 4 Disc set does contain the following:

Disc One: Careful (1992, 100 min, Remastered and Repressed Edition):

Disc Two: Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997, 90 min) + Archangel (1990, 83 min):

Disc Three: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary...