A foursome of films have been added to the 2012 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. Joining Sundance's "Spotlight" section (which showcases films that have made their mark on the festival circuit in the previous year) we've got a couple of Cannes films in Paolo Sorrentino's oddball comedy/travelogue/revenge pic (This Must Be The Place) and Joachim Trier, who will be attending the Sundance Screenwriting labs the week before will extend his stay in the state of Utah by showing one of our favorites of the year in, "Oslo, August 31st."

Here is some great news for fans of the long take. Cannes' 2007 Palme d'Or winning director Cristian Mungiu (4 months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) and Golden Lion winning director Abdellatif Kechiche (La Graine et le mulet) are two of the 18 European co-productions that have received coin from Council of Europe's Eurimages Fund.

New film projects by the likes of Aktan Arym Kubat (The Light Thief), Athina Rachel Tsangari (ATTENBERG), Taika Waititi (Eagle vs Shark), Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff), Úrszula Antoniak (Code Blue and Nothing Personal), Quentin Dupieux (Rubber and the Sundance selected Wrong), Florin Serban (If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle), Ruben Östlund (Play) and Aditya Assarat (Wonderful Town) are among the 36 projects participating in Rotterdam’s 29th co-production market CineMart (where a whopping 850 potential co-financiers add coin to future projects).

The week before the beast known as Sundance gets unleashed, 12 projects and their writers/directors will hit the Sundance Resort in Utah and get to work with such names as Lisa Cholodenko, Nicole Holofcener and Joachim Trier on what they hope will one day become feature film projects. This year appears to have more stories that go beyond U.S. borders and worth noting several of the mentioned lab attendees have a bit more "clout".

Ken Jacobs' SEEKING THE MONKEY KING, Alexis Dos Santos' Random Strangers and the Cannes winning Nash Edgerton's BEAR are part of the shorts program which this year is comprised of 64 films selected from a whopping 7,675 submissions.

Sundance will have some heavyweight auteurs in the shape of Spike Lee, Rodrigo Cortés, James Marsh and Stephen Frears for the Premieres Section. Among the 15 selected titles, worth highlighting are Leslye Headland’s debut, "Bachelorette" which stars Kirsten Dunst, we’ve got Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York and a Blacklist favorite in Celeste and Jesse Forever. Count on Lee’s Red Hook Summer, Cortés’ Red Lights, Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Frears’ Lay the Favorite to garner the most buzz.

Now in its third year, Sundance's NEXT section (which describes its works as "bold", and "innovative" (think more accessible than and just as low budget as the stuff we find in the New Frontiers section) grabs our attention because of its inclusion of Craig Zobel's latest effort, Compliance a true story drama perhaps in the same budget range as Great World of Sound.

New proof that mumblecore is heading into a natural fitting genere of horror, Katie Aselton's Black Rock and V/H/S - the project helmed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence featuring Joe Swanberg, Calvin Reeder, Adam Wingard, Sophia Takal and Kate Lyn Sheil are a pair of highly anticipated titles that'll be shown in Park City at Midnight. Among our correct predictions we find Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact and Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's wacko Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie.

It'll be a TIFF does Sundance this year in the Spotlight Program as the majority of the films programmed in the section (which staffers state, "regardless of where these films have played throughout the world, the Spotlight program is a tribute to the cinema we love") are films that moved from Cannes to TIFF en route to Sundance or had their world premieres at TIFF and are moving into Park City.

Sundance's World Docu Comp section might come across as the olympics with strong representation from 3 countries dominated by the Danes (Mads Brügger, Lise Birk Pedersen, Malik Bendjelloul and docu team Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim). With several items being carried over from this past November's IFDA Doc Film Festival, the 12 film section includes three Israeli film and three World Premieres from Canadian documentarians. Here's the complete list.

If you're a fan of the docu form especially those that genuinely begin their film festival life in Park City, then this group of 16 American documentary films that are the make up of the U.S. Documentary Competition appear to be docu gold. We've got some heavy hitters among docu filmmakers such as Don Argott, Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady, Lori Silverbush, Kirby Dick, Lauren Greenfield and Eugene Jarecki. All docs are obviously world premieres.

Of all the fourteen films/filmmakers mentioned we see Quentin Dupieux return to screen fairly quick after his debut film Rubber, we have Blue Tongue Films team member (Animal Kingdom, Hesher and tons of awesome short films) Kieran Darcy-Smith who gets behind the camera for Wish You Were Here with (see pic) Joel Edgerton topling.

A pair of films from our favorite auteurs So Yong Kim's For Ellen and Antonio Campos' Simon Killer are finally making their long awaited world film fest debuts and items from an emerging talent base in the likes of Benh Zeitlin, Ry Russo-Young and James Ponsoldt are part of a handful of lucky filmmakers selected in Sundance's U.S. Dramatic Competiton section.

Fresh off a big double win at the Gothams (where it won Best Feature and Best Ensemble), Mike Mills' Beginners has nabbed four nominations for the 27th Indie Spirit Awards tying with three other Best Feature hopefuls in Jeff Nichol's Take Shelter, The Descendants and Cannes preemed, Drive. However the four were outmatched by Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist which garnered five noms in Best Feature, Best Director, Best Male Lead, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography categories.

The 21st Gotham Awards ended with a hung jury: Mike Mills' “Beginners” and Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life” are both crowned with Best Feature film beating out fellow noms “The Descendants”, “Meek’s Cutoff” and “Take Shelter”.

A foursome of Sundance titles (Position Among the Stars, The Interrupters, Hell and Back Again and Senna) and a trio of titles that were launched at Tribeca (Clio Bernard’s The Arbor), Cannes 2010 (Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light) and SXSW (Tristan Patterson’s Dragonslayer) lead the noms with four a piece for this year's five edition of the Cinema Eye Honors -- the annual awards group that honors docu films in directing, editing, design and production tech categories.

Filmmakers -- especially French ones, and especially those working before the 50s -- are often overly romanticized amongst cinephiles. We love a great film, but we really love the underlying legends and myths of the artist and the creative process, struggling and screaming and clawing to get each film made, centralized on a whirligig of backstabbing, betrayal, and romance.

Continuing with their policy of spreading the joy in all categories, the Gotham independent film award nominations has Sean Durkin’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants” leading the pack with three noms each, but mysteriously it is Durkin's gem that is pushed aside in a Best Feature category that includes Fox Searchlight's The Descendants and Tree of Life, the other best indie film of the year in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter, and a pair of films that many of us associate to 2010 in Meek's Cutoff and Beginners.

Try to resist reading anything about Martin Scorsese’s big-budget 3D kids movie -- and latest masterpiece -- Hugo beforehand, or watching any trailers. Go on a Lent-like fast, and in a month’s time, you can discover its wonderful secrets freshly, as did the packed crowd at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall on Monday, Oct. 10, 2011, for the New York Film Festival’s special work-in-progress sneak preview.

Breaking out around the time where NYFF is on its last legs, Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma (October 12 to 23) kicks in with about four times the size in volume, and obviously more of an eclectic range. This year is the festival's big 40 - and for the occasion they've commissioned some of the names who've been a part of the festival to each contribute a short film in the context of what is being called the "Cartes Blanches" series. Denis Côté, Deco Dawson, Sophie Deraspe, Rodrigue Jean, Zacharias Kunuk, Marie Losier, Catherine Martin, Bruce McDonald, Théodore Ushev and Denis Villeneuve will each submit a four minute short.