Fantastic Fest '08 Badges are on sale now! VIP badges sold out while the '07 festival was still running, but there are some new ticket options for '08 including "2nd Half" and "Daytime Only" badges. UT Professor Ellen Spiro and Talkshow Host Phil Donahue's doc "Body of War" has made the Oscar shortlist. Check out Chris Garcia's interview with Spiro here. The Belgian government has honored four Austin filmmakers for their documentary work. We......

Chris Garcia over at Austin360 has the scoop on an open casting call for the upcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road. They're looking for "white boys, ages 7-10, with a thin/slight build"—presumably this is to cast the role of the young son in the story, who accompanies his father (to be played by Viggo Mortensen) as they make their way across a ravaged post-apocalyptic America. The casting call will take......

After a fantastic week of panels, parties and screenings, the Austin Film Festival will wrap up tonight with a screening of Sidney Lumet's highly anticipated Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Lumet (the man behind films like Running on Empty, Serpico, and one of our favorite movies ever, Dog Day Afternoon) directs an unbelievably great cast including Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman in this caper-gone-wrong thriller. We haven't had the......

[Via Chris Garcia @ Austin360] According to the Hollywood Reporter, a Memphis projectionist named Jesse Morrison was fired after writing a scathing early review of the new Fantastic Four flick for Austin-based Ain't It Cool News. (Because it's apparently some kind of closely guarded trade secret that Silver Surfer is going to blow.) In his capacity as a projectionist for the Malco Theater chain, Morrison was able to sneak a peek at quite a few......

For the sixth year in a row, MovieMaker Magazine has ranked Austin in the top 3 of its “Top Ten U.S. Cities to Live and Make Movies” list. And though we’ve slipped a little this year (we sat at number two for the last two years, just behind New York City), we still beat the crap out of Shreveport, which feels pretty good. Moviemaker cited the “unique education and support that the [Austin] community fosters......

Kat Candler has only recently wrapped her latest film, jumping off bridges, and already big things are happening. First, the rough cut of the film was chosen for the 2005 Independent Feature Project's Rough Cuts Lab. Kat and her Storie Productions cohorts (Lorie Marsh and Stacy Schoolfield) will travel to NYC in September to be a part of the market magic. Then, The Texas Filmmakers Production Fund awarded the film a $5,000 grant, which......