What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of things you’ll want to read, even if they didn’t originate on this website. We know, we know, all the good stuff can only come from Film School Rejects. But every once in a while (at least 8 times per day), other websites strike gold. And we’re here to celebrate their modest victories. We begin tonight with an image from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, one of a number released today by Magnolia Pictures. It features Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim as… well, I have no idea what’s going on in this picture. But apparently people find this funny. Having watched numerous episodes of their show, I’m not convinced that they’ve ever been funny. But who am I to argue with the masses? Oh right, I do argue with the masses. Seriously, guys, this stuff isn’t funny. At all.

This article is part of our Oscar Week Series, where you will find breakdowns and predictions for all of the major categories. Unlike last year, the field is wide open for which fantastic performance will earn the naked golden statue of power for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Some fans are sad not to see Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey or Miranda Richardson among the ranks here, but that shows just how strong these performances were. In no particular order, there’s a bartender with a boxer to build up, a mother with a boxer to build up, a Queen with a King to build up, a young girl with revenge on her mind, and a woman who would probably rip your face off and then talk about how great you are to it. With my winner prediction in red, here are the nominees:

At the end of the 90s, famous Oscar show writer and Celebrity Fit Club contestant Bruce Vilanch claimed that, “Generally with the Oscars…there isn’t much you can do until the nominations are announced. Then you know what kind of year you’re dealing with – what’s been overlooked, what the issues are.” He was talking about preparing to write the show, but it applies to everyone from the directors, producers and stars on down to the fans. It’s fun to guess around the water cooler (your office still has a water cooler?), but until now, it’s all been speculation. Thankfully, almost all that speculation has been spot on, so we can all continue our conversations about whether Black Swan will beat The Social Network for Best Picture. Whether Natalie Portman has any true competition for Best Actress. Whether, most importantly of all, Colleen Atwood will beat Mary Zophres for Best Costume Design. Here they are. The 2011 Academy Award nominees:

The past few weeks have been incredibly light when it comes to DVD Tuesdays, but that streak of limited releases appears to have come to an end. Fourteen titles are covered below, and they run the gamut from fantastic to pure drivel with a lot in between. Titles out this week include Animal Kingdom, Dark Skies, Justified, Freakonomics, Death Race 2, and more. And yes, I was as surprised as you that Takers is worth a rental.

Another seven days of movie watching, another week of Blu-ray releases to be dissected. As we move through the back-end of awards season, it’s going to be time for all of those hot Oscar hopefuls to make their play toward cashing in on all the buzz. The benefit to you is that you’ll get to see or own most of them very soon, and you don’t even have to leave your couch. This week brings us Animal Kingdom, the still under-the-radar crime thriller from down under. It also sees the streak of Criterion continue, with two more of their films ending up in my Buy section. I’m not pandering, I promise. They are just really good at releasing films on Blu-ray. It’s almost unfair to everyone else. Except for those of us who buy their stuff, of course. All this and more is just one click away in the latest entry of This Week in Blu-ray.

In case you don’t already know this, and in case the praise-filled poster above didn’t give it away… Animal Kingdom is an absolutely brilliant film. Sure FSR’s resident foreign film guy left it off his ‘Best Of 2010′ list, but there were some great foreign films last year and he’s truly sorry about the omission. (Did you hear that Jeff Hall? He’s sorry.) The film is a dark crime drama about a morally bankrupt family and the quietly introspective cousin who comes to stay with them after his mother dies. Guy Pearce stars as a local detective trying to bring the family down while saving the boy, but the two most outstanding performances come from actors you may not have met yet… Jacki Weaver is the deceptively cruel matriarch and Ben Mendelsohn is utterly terrifying as the uncle capable of anything. Check out my full review here. Animal Kingdom is hitting DVD on January 18th, and we’ve got a copy to give away to one lucky reader. To enter just leave us a comment below naming your favorite Australian movie and explaining why you love it so damn much. And no, it can’t be Animal Kingdom. Or Muriel’s Wedding. Bonus points if it manages to be a title that also includes or references an animal of some kind.

There are two reasons why looking at the best movie posters is fascinating. The first is the inherent interest that all advertising brings. It’s art that’s meant to sell something that can’t admit it’s trying to sell anything in order to succeed. The second is that rating the best of the best in the poster world has the most potential to showcase films that never end up on lists this time of year. This is a celebration of the beauty and effect that movie posters can have. It’s for the films released in 2010, and it’s the posters from the studios (or else Tyler Stout and Olly Moss would completely dominate). The awards are broken up into five categories in order to recognize the wide array of styles and concepts, and because there were a lot of great posters this year (among the absolutely terrible photoshop jobs that still haunt us). See if your favorite made the cut.

It’s that time of the year again: that brief span of time in between Christmas and New Year’s when journalists, critics, and cultural commentators scramble to define an arbitrary block of time even before that block is over with. To speculate on what 2010 will be remembered for is purely that: speculation. But the lists, summaries, and editorials reflecting on the events, accomplishments, failures, and occurrences of 2010 no doubt shape future debate over what January 1-December 31, 2010 will be remembered for personally, nostalgically, and historically. How we refer to the present frames how it is represented in the future, even when contradictions arise over what events should be valued from a given year. In an effort to begin that framing process, what I offer here is not a critical list of great films, but one that points out dominant cultural conversations, shared trends, and intersecting topics (both implicit and explicit) that have occurred either between the films themselves or between films and other notable aspects of American social life in 2010. As this column attempts to establish week in and week out, movies never exist in a vacuum, but instead operate in active conversation with one another. Thus, a movie’s cultural context should never be ignored. So, without further adieu, here is my overview of the Top 10 topics, trends, and events of the year that have nothing to do with the 3D debate.

One of my favorite non-starters for articles is the very bland “as you may know.” There’s no doubt in my mind that you’ve seen me use it in the past (I’m doing it again right now). So when I thought about how to begin this year’s top ten article, I wanted to begin by saying “as you may know, one of my great honors around here is to deliver my list of the ten best films of the year.” But you may not know how much of an honor that really is. In fact, it’s difficult for me to put into words how honored I feel to have anyone read this at all, let alone the scores of readers we see on a daily basis here at Film School Rejects. It’s safe to say that I speak for everyone here when I say that I am deeply honored by the opportunity just to write about film. You, the reader, offer that to us every day with your patronage. So my hope is that I can do you proud, dear reader, as I present my list of the ten best films of 2010. This year saw a great deal of personal turmoil for me, meaning some movie-watching blind spots. But some late-year scrambling has pushed my total films seen number well north of 200. And of those 200 or so eligible films, whittling it down to ten wasn’t quite as difficult as it’s been in recent years. Does that mean that [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The nominations for the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards will have been out for almost an entire day by the time you read this, so you’ve undoubtedly had plenty of time to scratch your heads and wonder, “hey, what about that Coen Brothers movie?” And while we still don’t have an answer to that one, we can see that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (or HFPA, as they are known to their friends) did slip in a few surprises in their 68th year. Don’t let anyone say that they can’t still be hip. So here, along with a list of all the film-related nominees, is a list of five interesting and (sometimes) pleasant surprises.

If you are anything like us, 2010 has felt like much of a let down at the movies, especially lately. What with all of the talk about the year’s final tentpole being a bust and the Golden Globes nominating a movie with Christina Aguilera not once, but twice, it’s easy to see how post-cinemadum depression may be setting in. Then we watched this incredibly well edited video from an artist named Gen-I. It’s called Filmography 2010, and it makes 2010 feel like it might actually have been a good year at the movies.

Around here, we don’t ask much of you, dear reader. However, we do ask that you are honest with yourself. And if you’re honest with yourself this week, you’ll probably note that you’ve (sadly) missed a lot of wonderful articles that our crack staff of writers have put together. I know I have. So it’s time to catch up, to get tuned in, and get your fill of all the wonderful editorials, reviews and (when we feel like it) movie news that you missed. It’s also time for the return of my own weekly endeavor, The Week That Was. The column that talks about the week… that was. Get it? I look back over the last seven days and select for you the highlights. Just in case you were busy waging a maritime war against bloodthirsty prehistoric fish, or something of the like.

J awakens one day to find his mother dead from a heroin overdose. He waits, calmly, while the ambulance attendants take her away, and then he calls the only other family he has. His grandmother, Janine (aka Smurf), picks him up and welcomes him into her home. J soon discovers why his mother tried to keep him away from this extended family… his three uncles along with a friend are involved deep in Melbourne’s criminal underworld including drug dealing, bank robbery, and possibly murder. J’s arrival coincides with a stepped-up police investigation into the family’s activities, and when a seemingly concerned detective singles out J as a possible witness the teen realizes survival of the fittest is no game… it’s a way of life. And death. Animal Kingdom is writer/director David Michod’s debut, and it’s this year’s answer to The Hurt Locker when it comes to pure, unrelenting tension. J is our window into not only the personal realm of one crooked family but also of the dangerous and menacing world outside. His Melbourne streets are the urban equivalent of the African Veldt where everyone is prey until they figure out the rules of nature and their place in it. Michod presents J’s indoctrination into this landscape as an uncertain path between a family determined to maintain their lifestyles at any cost and a police department hell-bent on taking them down by any means necessary. It’s as smart and assured of a film debut as anyone could have hoped, and [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

And somewhere in that world waits Julia Roberts, hiding in the shadows, waiting for her chance to pounce and eat, pray, and love the competition back into the nether worlds from whence they came. Scott Pilgrim might be fending off a league of evil exes for his true love, but he’s going to have a tougher time going up against not only Roberts’ popularity among the fairer sex but the testosterone-heavy multitude that will be pouring themselves into theaters to see Stallone and his posse rip people’s throats out. It’s going to be an all-out war at the box office this weekend, and The Other Guys might as well stay at their desks. They don’t have a shot of repeating.

I remain cautiously optimistic about Animal Kingdom, the blessed child of Cannes that’s gotten intensely high praise. It’s the story of a young man caught between a crime family and the long helpful arm of the law that’s intending to get him out before he’s pulled back in. Unfortunately for it, its premise, praise and promise of violent drama make it sound far too much like The Square which turned out to be more boring than riveting. Joel Edgerton’s involvement here doesn’t help the cause either.

According to today’s final line-up press release, LAFF will welcome the world premiere of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the third film in the popular glittery vampire romance franchise. But fans might be disappointed about how it’s scheduled to go down.

The first trailer for Animal Kingdom, the intense and atmospheric Australian crime drama that debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, has hit the web. The film was picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics, and will get an American release sometime this summer. As you will see from the trailer, it’s a film with some big family drama that gets very messy when things begin to fall apart.

Last night at a ceremony here in Park City, Utah, the winners of the annual awards were announced…

Atmospheric. That’s probably the best way to describe director David Michod’s Australian gangster flick Animal Kingdom. Interested? You fucking should be.

John Travolta with an RPG, school children sitting amongst rubble, and a family portrait featuring Labeouf and Douglas round out this week’s posters.