Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Happy-Go-Lucky (click image to enlarge), directed by Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies). The film, which premiered in Telluride and is currently screening at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, stars Sally Hawkins as an eternally optimistic teacher living and working in North London. Apart from the exclusive clip we debuted on Cinematical earlier in the week, Kim had this to say about the film: "All in all, I quite liked Happy-Go-Lucky; it's certainly one of Leigh's more mainstream-friendly films, and will appeal to moviegoers beyond the dress-all-in-black, gloom-and-doom cinephile crowd, while still retaining enough of the Leigh touch to satisfy most of the purists."

Happy-Go-Lucky will arrive in theaters with a smile on October 10.

Burn After Reading, the latest from the Coen Brothers, makes its North American debut this year, following last year's rapturous Toronto reception for the Oscar-winning success of the tense, terse No Country for Old Men. After making No Country for Old Men, in perverse Coen-logic, the timing is clearly right for a messy, mean-spirited, profane punchy comedy. Burn After Reading is built around a classic Coen plot -- there's a valuable something out there, and various ill-equipped, dimwitted people see it as the answer to all their problems -- and the pleasure of seeing the big ensemble cast bite down hard on small parts until the juice drips down their chin is dry, funny and rich. (Brad Pitt's work alone as a fitness trainer whose I.Q. is as immeasurably low as his body-fat percentage is, bluntly, inanely great -- full of verve and conviction, and deeply funny.)

The Coens make movies about desire -- the stuff of drama -- but they often choose to make them about idiocy -- the stuff of comedy -- as well; as various characters around Washington, D.C. pursue, posses or hope to profit from a lost CD of data that an ex-CIA man (John Malkovich, fussy and hilarious) has misplaced, the plot's in part just a canvas for Coen-syle, carefully-timed punchlines and comedy so dry it'll leave your lips chapped. There's also some great inside-baseball movie-joke stuff about the cliches of every techno-thriller -- the Taiko-drum scores, the lower-left-of-the-screen-type establishing place and time, the moody shots of shadowy figures who may or may not be following our heroes -- that work in a smart, sideways fashion, too. And every actor in Burn After Reading is playing someone having some kind of mid-to-late-life freakout, grabbing at chances to be happy, and failing while flailing and spitting out four-letter words as they go down; Kim will have her full review up later, but we laughed. A lot.

In case you haven't noticed, Cinematical has officially kicked off its coverage of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival with reviews of two of the biggest films screening this year: Rachel Getting Married and The Brothers Bloom. We have so much in store for you this year, it's best if you just sit back, relax and thank your lucky stars that someone else is in charge of fighting the crowds, the snarky journalists and the lack of sleep.

Most of our coverage will land on the main page here, but you'll always be able to find everything in one place over on our official TIFF Hub. Additionally, down there to the right of your screen you'll see a special Cinematical TIFF Widget housing quick links to all our TIFF coverage. Best of all, you can snag that and put it wherever you want (your site, your friends' site, the site of a total stranger) -- this way you (and your readers) will always know what's going on in Toronto. Could we make it any easier?

So, are you ready to check out a sneak peak of this fall's hottest movies? Do I even need to ask that? Enjoy the coverage, and let us know if there's anything you'd especially like to see.

It was perhaps indicative of the demographic of tonight's Midnight Madness premiere screening of hotly buzzed JCVD that before the show, the line for the men's' room outnumbered the line for the ladies' considerably. But you didn't have to be a guy to enjoy the film, and especially the vibe of the screening.

Before the show we attended the Pre-screening party for JCVD at Century Club; the party, like most of the parties at big film festivals, was packed with folks vying for the free booze, but unlike a lot of fest parties I've attended, many of the people tonight were enthusiastically pumped up for the screening of a film that most of us knew little about, other than it played the market at Cannes, and garnered considerable buzz at that prestigious fest off its screening there.

Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.

Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrian Brody) have grown up on the make, in a world of, as Jay's stage-setting narration puts it, "... grifters, ropers, faro fixers, tales drawn long and tall. ..." Stephen builds cons; Bloom gets close to the marks. Stephen's work on their scams is a weird, lucrative form of self-expression; as Bloom puts it, "My brother writes cons the way Russians write novels. ..." Bloom's work on their schemes is a weird, lucrative form of self-loathing; Bloom learns early on that playing a part means never having to be yourself, that he, when " ... being as he wasn't, could be as he wished to be." Stephen wants more. Bloom wants out.

Rachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it's also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great and sincere performances from the top down. When the two parts of Rachel Getting Married fall out of synch – as they do, most notably, in the last third of the film during Demme's raucous, joyous post-wedding reception – it's less catastrophic than it is curious, and the final film is still very much worth watching.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married; her little sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is coming for the big event ... which involves getting picked up from her most recent stay at a rehab clinic. A cynic could look at Hathaway's part in Rachel Getting Married and paraphrase Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder: Always go full rehab. And while it's true that the Academy and critics tend to reward gritty, hyperbolic portraits of drug-addiction's misery, the fact is that Hathaway's Kym is not quite as simple as that. Kym knows all the things she's done wrong; she also knows she'll keep doing some of them. Immediately, in the car, the lines of battle are drawn, with Kym going on the offense as part of her defense mechanisms, asking her dad (Bill Irwin) and step-mother (Anna Deavere Smith) about how Rachel's holding up: "Are all of her latent food issues coming up? Is she still hoarding Snickers and Cool Whip under the bed?" Soon, Kym's plunged into the thick of the preparations for Rachel's wedding, responding to the chaos by adding to it. ...

The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival is officially underway, and as always Cinematical is your one-stop-shop for all things TIFF. Our reviews, galleries, interviews and scene coverage will begin to populate the main page soon, but in the meantime we've been sharing some great exclusive clips, images and posters from some of the more talked-about flicks screening in Toronto this year. Below, feast your eyes on a clip from Picasso & Braque Go To The Movies, produced and narrated by none other than Martin Scorsese. The film, from art dealer-producer-director Arne Glimcher (The Mambo Kings) delves deep into the relationship between film and the visual arts, and it features folks like Scorsese, Chuck Close and Julian Schnabel. For more on Picasso and Braque, see the film's official summary over on the TIFF website.

Cinematical is very excited to bring you this exclusive clip from the new flick JCVD, which, surprisingly, has watched a tremendous amount of buzz build around it since it first screened at this past Cannes Film Festival. Now, as part of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival midnight slate (it premieres tonight!), JCVD will receive a more proper introduction (or should I say, re-introduction) to the world. JCVD, of course, stands for our good friend Jean-Claude Van Damme, star of such action flicks as Kickboxer, Timecop, Universal Solider (first bootleg I ever watched), Double Impact, Death Warrant ... shall I go on?

From what I understand, JCVD follows Van Damme (who stars as himself) as he travels back to his home country in an attempt to find peace and tranquility after whatever was left of his career seemed to vanish. We'll have a review coming up very soon, but in the meantime check out this very funny clip below as it should give you an idea of the vibe this flick is going for. Dare I say this might be one of my most anticipated films of the fall season? JCVD will also play Fantastic Fest before arriving in theaters (in limited release) on November 7.

The Toronto International Film Festival starts September 4th - but, not to dash your mental images or anything, the truth is that the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival started a few weeks ago. Toronto has several great films from Cannes this year making their North American debut, to be sure -- like the riveting crime-and-power tales Gomorra and Leonera, or the French films Entre Les Murs and Un Conte de Noel -- but apart from that earlier bow for several films at Toronto this year, press screenings of several big-ticket films have been taking place in Toronto, New York, L.A. and other cities for the past two weeks.

I've already seen several of this year's bigger Toronto films, including: a major American director's bold and big take on issues of war, power and faith; a drama where a major star might not only earn Oscar's notice for the first time in her career but also sincerely deserves it; a whimsical-but-warm, giddy-yet-grounded comedy-action-drama where a director confirms their successful debut film wasn't just a fluke; a sure-to-be-controversial mix of vital, lively discourse and hilarious deadpan comedy ... and a few more. The hotels are filling up; desks are crowded with the clutter and tools of the working modern movie writer; Google calendars are crafted with the same careful concentration that's devoted to plans of battle, and are equally likely to survive unchanged. Soon, the festival starts in earnest, and you'll find our reviews here then, but today, in the buzzing calm before North America's biggest film festival has its formal bow, the excitement's raw, real and incredibly exciting.

In spite of the writer's strike keeping several larger films that otherwise would have been on the Telluride slate out of this year's fest, and the absence of Cannes Palm d'or winner The Class, which many had hoped to see here (that film is opening the upcoming New York Film Festival, and so was unable to play at Telluride), the 35th Telluride Film Festival was a solid success.

The fest scored sneak previews of Danny Boyle's hotly anticipated Slumdog Millionaire, which was very well received by audiences, and gave North American premieres to some films that you'll likely be hearing about come Oscar time, including I've Loved You So Long, Flame and Citron, and Adam Resurrected, and Everlasting Moments.