In a small village in Colombia, the pregnant Maria supports her family. She is fired, and with no hope of finding a new job, she decides to accept the offer to work as a drug mule, flying to the US with sixty-two pellets of cocaine in her stomach.

McFly!

Maria Full of Grace

A quote:

"Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin says, you look like you're wearing a tuxedo. The second penguin says, what makes you think I'm not?"

From the NYT review:

If it sometimes seems to be on the verge of falling apart, that's the point. The film is, partly, a protest against the smooth, standardized, bottom-line culture represented by the Axeman, and a defiant celebration of imperfection, improvisation and accident.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

If you haven't seen City of God, it is definitely worth your time.

Two boys growing up in a violent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro take different paths: one becomes a photographer, the other a drug dealer.

Jello wrote:

Really good movie about a favela-ish neighborhood in Rio, and the drug trade as an industry there, the culture of youth violence, and a big ass gang war in a hood that has no police.

You'll note this film is presently #17 on the IMDB top 250. This puts it ahead of such classics as Dr. Strangelove, Citizen Kane, North by Northwest, Once Upon a Time in the West, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Chinatown, and much more. In fact, everything except for, well, 16 films, and of those, only two were released in the last ten years.

Roger Ebert says:

The film has been compared with Scorsese's "GoodFellas," and it deserves the comparison.

Stephen Holden of NYT says:

"City of God" conveys the authenticity of a cinéma vérité scrapbook. Cesar Charlone's restless cinematography is a flashy potpourri of effects that include slow and accelerated motion, the use of split screens and a dramatically varied expressionistic palette.

Cidade de Deus (2002)

The routine wasn't very funny, not because it came so close to the truth but because, like so much of "SNL" lately, it just wasn't funny.

It's funny because it's true. Not to be confused with Colbert's Press dinner speech, which wasn't funny because it was true.

Comedy is complicated, but that's a nice dress. And the new movie looks interesting. I read about it yesterday in FLM.

Portrait of the Party Girl as a Young Artist

How many have you seen?

1 Salo (1975) Pier Paolo Pasolini
2 Natural Born Killers (1994) Oliver Stone
3 Crash (1996) David Cronenberg
4 The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) Martin Scorsese
5 The Devils (1971) Ken Russell
6 Pretty Baby (1977) Louis Malle
7 Birth of a Nation (1915) DW Griffith
8 Straw Dogs (1971) Sam Peckinpah
9 Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) Terry Jones
10 Bandit Queen (1994) Shekhar Kapur

Guardian Unlimited Film | News | the 10 most controversial films of all time

We are at the bright dawn of the movies' digital age, but the Hollywood establishment still has its shades drawn.

The Oscar revelers seemed unaware that movies have two big problems: the way they're made and the way they're shown.

Rodriguez: "It's nice because you don't have this huge army. It's a commando group of people really into the project."

Spielberg: "I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor with mini-strands of film around his neck."

To directors, moviegoing is an almost religious act: a Mass experience.

The genius of late 20th century entrepreneurism was to get people to pay a lot for things they were used to getting cheap (coffee) or free (water).

All five of last year's top worldwide grossers were fantasies, and all but one (The Chronicles of Narnia) a sequel or a remake.

Interesting data points:

It costs about $1,200 for a film print and about $200 for a digital print.

Can This Man Save The Movies? (Again?)

On these pages, the artist Jeff Koons, whose Pop aesthetic straddles pool toys and porn stars with equal glee, reimagines Gretchen Mol's — and Bettie Page's — transformation.

Only this time around, Mol is a star.

Click through to the slideshow. I like the next to last one, with Tweety Bird.

Gretchen Mol | NYT Style

Ballet Mécanique is awesome. Once you finish it, go watch the video for "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.

Virtually all the Unseen Cinema items are striking, and some are downright dazzling. One example is Ballet Mécanique (1924), directed by the French artist Fernand Léger and the American cinéaste Dudley Murphy, who provided many of the movie's playful, collagelike visual ideas. A staple of modernist programs in classrooms and elsewhere, the film contains many seminal Dadaesque images: a woman swooping upside down on a garden swing, a newspaper headline with animated letters, a washerwoman trudging up a staircase that never ends. What's new in the Unseen Cinema presentation is the presence of George Antheil's music, composed for the film in 1924 but never before paired with the movie in a readily available edition — not surprisingly, since Antheil's score calls for an unorthodox orchestra including a siren, three xylophones, numerous electric bells, and three airplane propellers.

After years of viewing Ballet Mécanique in silence, I found it thrilling to see and hear it in a form even more authentic than that experienced by its original Vienna audience some 82 years ago, when the music — too unwieldy to sync up properly with the movie — was ingloriously omitted. Its unprecedented sounds and images remind me why I love exposing students to such audacious, inimitable work. In an age when movies and TV shows are straitjacketed in a tiny number of iron-clad formulas, the obstreperous sights and sounds of a Ballet Mécanique are eruptions of liberating artistic freedom that wake and shake our habit-ridden sensibilities.

Both of the film collections reviewed in this article are available through NetFlix.

DVD Access to the Avant-Garde

This story's been going on for a while now, and no one has mentioned anything about it.

"When you look at these cases, you have to ask yourself, 'Is there a protection racket in Los Angeles?' And I think you are seeing evidence that there is right now, that people are using extra-legal means to neutralize antagonists in legal proceedings. The integrity of the courts has been called into question."

"There is a great deal of schadenfreude going around among the lawyers who are not targets, I'm sure."

A B-Movie Becomes a Blockbuster

Fancy yourself a movie buff and a gambler? Keep your eye on the *.

Think you know who's going to take home the Oscar? Cast your vote now!

Predict correctly and you could win an all-expense paid weekend in Hollywood to watch your favorite stars arrive at the 79th Academy Awards in 2007! Seated in the Red Carpet arrival area*, you will be able to watch as the stars strut for the cameras and the fans!

* Grand Prize does not include tickets to the Academy Awards Ceremony itself; it only consists of seating in the bleachers in the red carpet arrival area.

Oooh, somebody stop me. Please.

Entertainment Weekly and ABC want to send you to the bleachers!