Once upon a time, Peter Jackson knew how to do this. His 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures, was a large part of the reason he was given the keys to Middle Earth and allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars as a relative unknown on one of the most anticipated film projects of the last decade, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He had already shown, in the jokey cult splatter flicks of his early career, the kind of effects magic he could work even on a minimal budget. But it was Creatures, a more serious-minded true-story drama about two teenage girls who commit a grisly murder, that showed he could successfully weave together fantasy with affecting emotion. more ›

In the security line at the DC courthouse: more ›

If last week's review of Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep was about a movie that tried to make real life look like a comic book, Christian Volckman's first feature-length film, Renaissance, tries to make a comic book look like real life. The basis of the movie's imagery is motion capture technology, by which the movements of an actor's body are recorded by sensors attached to his clothing (used memorably by Peter Jackson in the creation of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy). In this way real actors create lifelike movements in computer-generated animated scenery. When the movie was originally released in France in March, the dialogue was recorded by a French team of actors, but this fall's American and U.K. release features a different group of actors performing in English. more ›

FRIDAY: >> The Avalon Theatre is hosting Prism 2005: The New Cinema of Serbia and Montenegro through Sunday, and tonight at 7 p.m. is popular Serbian actor-director-producer Ljubisa Samardzic's Skyhook. The film (pictured), a surprisingly life-affirming basketball flick set in the midst of NATO bombings in 1999, earned positive buzz at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival. >> We don't know about you, but we've been kinda addicted to Peter Jackson's Production Diary, the LOTR director's... more ›