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After crafting the rather ambitious triptych-structured The Place Beyond the Pines, director Derek Cianfrance headed into adaptation territory for his next drama. From author M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans follows a lighthouse keeper on a remote island in Australia who, with his wife, rescues a baby they find in a rowboat and raise it as their own. Led by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Rachel Weisz, we hoped it would arrive this year, but that won’t be the case.

To help with the wait, a reader has sent in the first image, seen above. While we can’t locate the official source, that is certainly Vikander standing in front of an ocean, with a fair amount of fading light, so we’ll take their word for it. With some test screenings occurring earlier this year, the only hint of quality we were offered is from Deadline, noting...

Indian films influenced by German expressionism will be screened at a series titled ‘Indian Expressionism’ at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell LightBox. The film package, curated by Indian critic and consultant, Meenakshi Shedde will run from 14th to 21st November, 2012.

German Expressionism refers to a series of creative movements in Germany prior to the First World War. The movement sought for change by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles.

The films to be screened are:

Light of Asia (14th November, 6:15pm)

Hindi: Prem Sanyas / German: Die leuchte asiens

Dir.: Franz Osten / Starring: Himansu Rai and Seeta Devi

Light of Asia (1925) is an Indo-German co-production based on the life of Buddha. This is a silent film with English intertitles.

The Blue Angel (14th November, 8:30pm)

German: Der Blaue Engel

Dir.: Josef Sternberg / Starring: Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings

The Blue Angel (1930) is a German film with English subtitles.

In a festival absolutely stuffed full of films from all over the world, it’s natural that you are going to encounter a few oddities. It’s inevitable in fact, what with the varying culture clashes, budgets, levels of the industry each film comes from etc. Considering some of the films I have seen at the festival it may come as surprising that the weirdest of the bunch comes from Francis Ford Coppola.

Francis Ford Coppola is the sort of director that the word “eclectic” was created for. Many of you will think “The Godfather” or “Apocalypse Now” or perhaps even “Rumble Fish” when his name is uttered. Maybe you’re an awesome person and only think of “Jack” when his name is whispered down the halls. The fact that the man who made “Jack” also made “The Godfather” is mind boggling enough, let alone the man now standing before us with Twixt.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

For a while there the only articles we could write about Roman Polanski were his issues with the law, and the pressures the U.S. Government were putting on the rest of the world to have him arrested and deported back to the States to stand trial for a crime the victim has long since forgiven him for. So it sure is nice to finally be back writing about him for the right reasons – a motion picture he has directed and premiered this morning to the Venice Film Festival crowd.

An adaptation of the play God of Carnage, written by Yasmina Reza, his latest revolves around two Middle-class New York couples who are forced to spend an afternoon together because their children got into a fight at school. So they are trying to do what adults should do: be civilized and solve the issue in a polite manner.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Like a great shining beacon of hope in the Mean-Spirited Comedy Summer of 2011, Our Idiot Brother boasts a heartfelt message delivered through Paul Rudd’s unfiltered, socially retarded but almost preternaturally good-hearted Ned. Director Jesse Peretz (who also directed Rudd in The Ex and 2001’s little-seen The Château), working from a screenplay by Evgenia Peretz and her husband David Schisgall, delivers a breezily paced comedy enlivened by a top-notch “indie” cast. With only a clichéd third act to run down the film’s merits, Brother deserves much praise for taking the road not traveled and avoiding glorifying an ego-driven, potty-mouthed protagonist.

Ned is, for all involved, something of an idiot savant who’s neither idiotic nor particularly learned, rather just out of touch with the fast-paced lives of his three very different sisters. When Ned’s moral code lands him in jail after selling pot to a uniformed officer,...

Roman Polanski is back in the headlines for the right reasons these days and I was happy to read in my inbox last night that his latest movie Carnage, based on French playwright Yasmina Reza’s dramatic play Gods of Carnage, has been chosen to open the New York Film Festival. The news came just days after the film was included in the Venice Film Festival line-up.

Polanski’s film takes the much lauded spot David Fincher’s The Social Network premiered with last year and then went on to dominate the rest of the year’s Oscar discussion (until The King’s Speech came along… and well the rest is history).

In what will be a dialogue heavy four thesp film, Kate Winslet/Christoph Waltz & John C. Reilly/Jodie Foster star as two middle-class New Yorker parents who meet for dinner after their respective children are involved in a fight and school,...

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Yet another addition to the relentless found footage horror subgenre, this ode to Norse folklore attempts to present fable as conspiracy based fact in its demystifying of the legendary Scandinavian monster. The Troll Hunter’s premise is no less than intriguing: a group of student documentary filmmakers attempt to chronicle the unscrupulous activities of Norway’s titular Trollbuster. The man in question, Hans – who cuts a sinister shady figure in black hunter hat and gear – reluctantly agrees on one condition: they do exactly as he instructs.

If Quint from Jaws swapped the shores of Amity for the mountains of Norway and had a penchant for trolls over the fin-friendly variety then our man Hans wouldn’t be a too distant remove from the weathered seafarer. Our secrecy shrouded myth hunter is a chap who literally lives and breaths trolls – his trailer dwelling is littered with troll trophies,...

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

(Review by Mark Zhuravsky from the U.S. where the film is released on Friday)

It can be argued (without much controversy) that the most definitive gangster picture in the last two decades is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas – the 1990 film covering the exploits of one Henry Hill which introduced an innervating, fleet-footed pacing to the plodding epics of the 70s and 80s. Jonathan Hensleigh’s new film, Kill The Irishman internalizes the influences of the many films that followed in the wake of Goodfellas – and it doesn’t deny it. The film is a fun, ephemeral mini-epic that races to an inevitable conclusion but oversteps its virtues when the third act attempts for something approaching gravity.

Mr.Hensleigh is the director of 2004’s The Punisher as well as the 2007 straight-to-video horror-schlock Welcome To The Jungle. Hensleigh’s star in Kill The Irishman is character actor Ray Stevenson...

Just six weeks before release and Summit Entertainment have yanked away The Beaver’s March 23rd U.S. opening, pushing the Mel Gibson-led dramedy back to May 6th, before going wide on the 20th. The reason cited is director & co-star Jodie Foster’s acting schedule which relents somewhat by May will now allow her to promote the movie and I suppose we can buy it as the SXSW premiere is still in tact and if they were worried about the reaction, they would have pulled it from there too.

The move puts The Beaver in direct competition with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and on it’s wide expansion, Thor. Originally it was set to open against Sucker Punch, so I guess Foster couldn’t really hide away from the ever churning blockbuster machine. A mystery still surrounds it’s U.K. date as IMDb still lists...

I gotta say, I’m not gettin’ that Mike Judge buzz off of anything I’ve seen connected to Extract (opens in the U.S. on September 4; no U.K. date has been announced yet). I see a poster that informs me that this is “a comedy that hits you where it hurts” under a phallic image of a bottle and two walnuts, one of which is broken, which I can only take to mean that this is a movie that believes it has nothing to say to people who don’t have testicles. I see TV ads in which sexually frustrated Jason Bateman complains about his wife, who refuses to have sex with him if he arrives home after 8pm (why would a guy stay married to someone who didn’t want to have sex with him?), but hey, there’s a new tramp at work who’ll surely...