Why do we watch movies? No, really, why is it? As close an answer as we’ve ever come to for our own, fairly evident obsession with what we consider the greatest storytelling medium humankind has ever developed, is well, that life is short. Bear with us a second on this: basically to submerge yourself in a story well-told is a way to live out other lives within your own, and through those complex and magical processes of identification, to breathe and dream and feel things that your own short span might otherwise never afford you. Of course for many movies that experience, of killing a mutant robot or whatever, may have evaporated before you’ve picked the last of the popcorn husks from between your teeth. But occasionally, very rarely, we experience the cinema not of escape but of exploration in which the discoveries you make stay with you and become knitted into the fabric of your memory as surely as if you’d really been there, really done that. And so it was with Abdellatif....

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Just how enduring has the legacy of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" been? More than thirty years after it was made, we're still talking about, and it's not just because of Rodney Ascher's excellent documentary "Room 237. In the past while, we've seen: a prequel start developing at Warner Bros. another conspiracy theory doc "The Shining Code 2. 0" make the rounds; that helicopter shadow get explained and the lost, original ending surfacing. And so, do you want more? Well, here you go. Put together by eight students in the Film and Television program in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire as a project to help them earn live work experience as part of their undergraduate degree, comes a generous 55-minute oral history of "The Shining" entitled "(Extended) Staircases To Nowhere: Making Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. nbsp;(Um, awesome school assignment). nbsp;The history of the film is done via interviews and includes participation by producer....

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To the outsider, the Cannes Film Festival can be a nebulous thing. Even if you know the filmmaker or the cast, sometimes you need more context than a review to give you a sort of firmer grasp of the shape, texture and tone of a movie. Clips from the festival are landing left and right, so we thought we'd grab a smattering and ground you a little deeper than some of the reviews and pictures your may or may not have seen. nbsp;So here we go. The first clip is a featurette from "Zulu," the official Closing Film of Cannes this year, that brings together some interesting talent for what seems to be a hard-boiled crime tale. Directed by Jérôme Salle ("Largo Winch" and "Anthony Zimmer," which was later remade as "The Tourist" with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie) "Zulu" stars Orlando Bloom and Forest Whitaker as a couple of South African cops on a case that goes to the highest levels. Cape Town, 2010. A mutilated corpse is discovered in the....

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This morning, Alexander Payne's black and white, father/son roadtrip film, "Nebraska," debuted in Cannes. Starring the unlikely trio of Bruce Dern, comedian Will Forte and Stacy Keach, “Nebraska” centers on a poor old man (Dern) living in Montana who repeatedly escapes from his house to go to Nebraska to collect a sweepstakes prize he thinks he has won. ustrated by his increasing dementia, his family debates putting him into a nursing home -- until one of his two sons (Forte) finally offers to take his father by car, even as he realizes the futility of it all. nbsp;It’s a comedy and while our reviewer didn’t necessarily love it, she called it a “small-scale quixotic adventure about the importance of dreams,” and coming from Alexander Payne that’s probably worth giving a shot to even if it doesn’t surprise us as much as we’d like. n for the film Payne said he watched “Coming Home” starring Bruce Dern and the black and white Peter Bogdanovich films, “Paper Moon” and “The....

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Following the release of "Star Trek Into Darkness," its male creators came under fire for a sequence where Alice Eve, playing a brilliant scientist who in the original continuity is responsible for a godlike device that can create life on barren planets, strips down to her underwear for no discernable reason. Kirk (and by extension, the camera) chooses to leer. It's a pretty unnecessary sequence and no matter how adorable Eve is (and, truly, her physique could be described as godlike), it had no real business being in the movie. While co-writer/producer Damon Lindelof has issued a public apology, director J. J. Abrams has taken a different approach. One that involves footage of Benedict Cumberbatch in the shower. That'll certainly even the scales…Over the weekend Lindelof began an email conversation with MTV News' Josh Horowitz. nbsp;When the conversation turned to the question of why Eve was in her underwear, the notoriously self-deprecating Lindelof shot back: "Why is Alice Eve in....

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So, is "X-Men: Days Of Future Past" gonna be the "Where's Waldo" of comic book movies? Because this is now beyond ridiculous, moving into the surreal. Just to refresh your memory: Charles Xavier, Professor X, Young Magneto, Old Magneto, Beast, Storm, Mystique, Wolverine, Rogue, Shadowcat, Iceman, Colossus, and Blink are all set to appear, along with other roles slated to be played by Peter Dinklage, Omar Sy, Booboo Stewart, Fan Bingbing and Adan Canto. And now, Bryan Singer is throwing another nerd log on the fire, with yet another comic character set to spent five seconds on screen. Here's a little mud in your eye "The Avengers 2" -- Evan Peters is going to play Quicksilver in 'Future Past. Why? Because we're sure it's integral to the story and has nothing to do with Fox wanting to lay claim to the character since it was confirmed he appears in Joss Whedon's sequel script along with sibling hero Scarlet Witch. It's all pretty petty and dumb and frankly, adds another....

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A new trailer has just debuted for next month's Pixar prequel "Monsters University," which revolves around the story of how Mike (Billy Crystal) met Sulley (John Goodman) in the monster-fied version of higher education, going from bitter rivals to the best of friends. The trailer is typically energetic, made even more so by the music – a brand new dance track created by Swedish House Mafia collaborators Axwell and Sebastian Ingrosso called "Roar," a song that sounds like it wouldn't be out of place at the next frat party. The trailer mostly features clips that we've seen in other trailers for the movie, but the shortness of the clip and the throbbing music that is backing it gives the footage an even more freewheeling feeling. It's clear from these early promotional materials that the breakout monster seems like it's going to be Art, a purple, Slinky-like weirdo voiced by Charlie Day (who also co-stars in this summer's similarly monster-filled "Pacific Rim"). Easily the biggest....

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Arrested Development," as the opening credits inform us, is the story "of one wealthy family, who lost everything and the son who had no choice but to keep them all together. This synopsis, about the Bluth family and their continued struggles, makes it sound like something out of the Chuck Lorre factory of middlebrow mediocrity. But "Arrested Development," created by cracked genius Mitchell Hurwitz, would go on to become one of the most beloved (and short-lived) comedy series in the history of television, one whose fan-base was so outspoken that this weekend the series will be resurrected with a collection of episodes airing exclusively on Netflix's streaming service. The unthinkable has happened: The Bluths are back from the dead. nbsp;In honor of this glorious return, which is far more impressive than Jesus showing up, we decided to run down the five best episodes from the first three seasons of this twisted series. Hopefully this list will please everyone – analrapists,....

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and hiatus over. It's safe to say that Steven Soderbergh has pretty much done it all in the cinema world (except make a western, which he has said is not a genre he's a particular enthusiast for) and has grown a bit weary of storytelling in that format. He's been there, done that, won a Palme d'Or and an Oscar, so now it's time to conquer a new medium, so how about television? Okay, he went down that road a bit with the short lived "K Street" in 2003, but the industry has changed massively in the ensuing decade. Now, Soderbergh is getting back behind the camera. He'll be taking on "The Knick" over at Cinemax, a ten-episode series (which he'll helm every episode of -- take that David Fincher! set to star Clive Owen. Sweet fancy moses. Sounding like an old-timey "E. R. the show is set in 1900s New York City and will center around the Knickerbocker Hospital, and surgeons, nurses and staff who did some amazing work without the techniques of modern medicine available at their....

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