Over the course of the year, curating the Short Film of the Day feature has given me a deep and affecting appreciation of the art form. Before, I hadn’t given much thought to the little bastards, but the truth is that they are incredibly versatile and representative of the boundaries that film can break. They can be jokes told well or human dramas driven home. They can be a perfect bite or demand to be expanded into a full meal. They can feel classic or break out into the long, strange realm of experimentation. They are so much more than movies with short runtimes. There’s one difficulty in judging them, though. With such variation, pinpointing how one can be better than another gets to be tricky. So, no matter the order, the one constant is that all the movies listed here are outstanding at what they do. The other (small) problem is that sometimes short films spend a long time touring festivals and otherwise being unavailable online. Thus, eligibility here is based solely on when a movie hit the web for us to digest. In that way, it’s the best short films from 2010-2011, but I have a feeling that that trivia won’t matter once you sit glued to the screen at the talent on display here.


Why Watch? Director Tim Hetherington was killed yesterday while filming the violence taking place in Libya. The Oscar-nominated documentarian was no doubt bold in the face of danger, and his filmmaking belied that fact. This short from Hetherington is a surreal attempt at capturing his personal experience of the places he’s been and distilling that into something completely non-objective. It’s a beautifully shot, fascinating film, and featuring it in Hetherington’s honor only seems fitting. What Will It Cost? Just 19 minutes of your time. Does it get better any better than that? Check out Diary for yourself:


Today is Chuck Palahniuk‘s 49th birthday, which means that the writer and member of the Lost Generation gets to blow out some candle, eat some cake, and mail a few plastic lobsters to people. It also means that we get to take a look at the novels he’s written that still need to be made into movies. For those that don’t read our site on the weekends at all (because kites don’t fly themselves), we normally run this column every Saturday, but seeing how it’s a special occasion and seeing as how we don’t care much for rules, we figured it was a great time to comb through the Fight Club and Choke author’s stuff to celebrate it a bit. To that end, here are 9 Chuck Palahniuk books that are ripe for the movie picking.

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published: 12.23.2014
published: 12.22.2014
published: 12.19.2014

Fantastic Fest 2014
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