Shorts, 11/12.

The AFI Fest jury has awarded top prizes to Grbavica (narrative) and Buddha's Lost Children (documentary); indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has more.

From Lynn Hirschberg's cover profile of Will Ferrell through Deborah Solomon's chat with Chris Rock and AO Scott's piece on the persistence of sight gags, comedy is the focus throughout this week's special "Movie Issue" of the New York Times Magazine.

Also:

• John Hodgman collects the wit and wisdom of ten comics.

• Jon Gertner, Rob Walker, Matthew Klam and Gabriel Snyder all take on various aspects of comedy's money-making potential.

• More profiles! Sara Corbett meets Anna Faris, Alex Witchel, Christopher Guest and Jack Hitt, Spanish gross-out comedian Santiago Segura Torrente.

• The fun browse: 22 comedians each name five desert-island comedy discs.

Allow acquarello to introduce you to the cinema of Robert Todd and Patrick Bokanowski.

David Hare's 24th play, The Vertical Hour (extract), opens on Broadway on November 30, the occasion for a lengthy profile in the Observer, for which Gaby Wood also speaks with director Sam Mendes and stars Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy.

Also in the Observer:

• "You don't need to have foreign parents to understand Britain... but it helps." Kate Kellaway talks with Anthony Minghella, Amma Asante, Pawel Pawlikowski and Gurinder Chadha. Related: Akin Ojumu on Britain's next generation of filmmakers.

• Looking ahead to the London Children's Film Festival (November 18 through 26), which is, at least, "a step in the right direction," Mark Kermode finds we have a long way to go before we can regain the quality of not only children's films but also family films of the pre-television decades. Somewhat related: Stormbreaker's got "thrills and spills ideally suited for the five-to-15 market."

• Luke Jennings: "My guilty pleasure is a film genre so derided that it doesn't have a name. I call it Vatican Noir."

• Philip French quite likes The Prestige.

• Katie Toms profiles Bandit, a fox currently starring in Venus, Breaking and Entering and Miss Potter.

Todd at Twitch: "Nominally a gangster film but really a lushly realized character drama A Dirty Carnival is blessed with a detailed script, a host of realistic and fully fleshed out characters, and a charismatic and complex lead performance from Jo In-Seong." Also, Funky Forest: The First Contact: "How to describe the indescribable?"

While Prime Suspect: The Final Act garners raves (John Leonard in New York, for example, or Alessandra Stanley in the NYT), for Tim Lucas, it's an opportunity for a career-encompassing appreciation of Helen Mirren.

Sarah Sands celebrates the true star of Casino Royale, Daniel Craig's torso, all "functioning muscle." Also in the Independent, Kevin Jackson visits Industrial Light and Magic. Related, and via MCN, Ian Johns in the London Times on the future of animation.

David Gates: "If you've ever hankered for the real lowdown on Mickey Mouse's creator and alter ego - it's worth the hankering, since he was one of America's most influential mythographers - Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination has it, sort of." Also at the Newsweek site: Sean Smith on the "Christian Movie Boom" and Malcolm Jones's remembrance of Adrienne Shelly.

Many will argue that In the Bedroom isn't just a better film than Little Children, it's crucially better; that is, it works, while the followup doesn't. Back in 2001, Ray Pride spoke at length with Todd Field about his feature debut and the interview's online now for the first time.

For Primarily, Eric Kohn talks with Conventioneers director Mora Stephens and producer Joel Viertel.

Robert Cashill on The Aura: "[Fabian] Bielinsky's attempt to create the fugue-state experience of an aura is admirable; to judge from my experience, it may have worked too well."

Dennis Cozzalio at Flickhead: "Go for Zucker has a fascinating subject at its heart - the pull of Jewish tradition in a modern German culture where it was once all but obliterated - but in the end that heart, as good and well-intended as it is, turns out to be a little too soft."

Richard Goldstein in the Nation: "A dexterous delivery allows Baron Cohen to deny his race and class - which in turn allows his audience to do the same. This suspension of disbelief may free up the yuks, but the laughter is just as primitive as Borat's barbaric ways. And that's no joke."

For those already making notes for your year-end best-of lists - and boy, who can possibly wait to see every last one of those - Joe Bowman's got a long list that might serve to jog a memory or two.

Designers: How fast can you work? Palm Pictures is accepting submissions to its "Design the 13 Tzameti DVD Cover Contest" through noon (EST) tomorrow.

Online viewing tip. Run Wrake's Rabbit. Via several channels, and no wonder.

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2006 3:59 PM