Best Director is a tricky category with, like many awards bestowed at the Oscars, a questionable track record. Venerated filmmakers like Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Altman, for instance, never won the award. While it’s arguably impossible to objectively compare different works of art, Best Director is an especially elusive and subjective category that forces one to compare apples to oranges, especially with this year’s nominees.

Landon Palmer explores the nature of the Oscar nominated film The Hurt Locker, and the right of critics to call it an art house film.

Director Kathryn Bigelow took seven years to go from one project (2002′s K-19: The Widowmaker) to another (2009′s The Hurt Locker). And while that isn’t exactly the decade-plus that ex-husband James Cameron took between Titanic and Avatar, it certainly isn’t a little break. So to see her already jumping into another project is surprising…

Neil has finished his gallivanting, and he makes his triumphant return to the Magical Studio in the Sky. Get ready to be offended, folks! The Fat Guys are back in action. (And by “action,” we mean “sitting their fat asses on the couch.”)

It was a quiet triumph that passed unnoticed by people who don’t follow film all that closely. But many of us took notice, as Kathryn Bigelow brought home the top prize at the DGA awards, solidifying her place in history.

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema: now with zero Trans fat! It may not add inches to your waistline, but recent research indicates that reading this column can cause a layer of processed cheddar to coat your cerebrum.

The Directors Guild of America announced the nominees for its 62nd Annual Awards today, honoring outstanding directorial achievement in feature films.

The wonderful group of fine professional film critics and journalists known as the Austin Film Critics Association — a group that includes the membership of yours truly and FSR Managing Editor Dr. Cole Abaius — has announced its award winners for the year 2009.

Since Peter Berg might possibly, maybe, could not be directing Dune, we’ve decided to throw a few hats into the ring. Who do you think could helm one of the hardest science fiction adaptations of all time?

After being blown away by The Hurt Locker, I was lucky enough to talk to Mackie about his role, the experience of the Middle East during Ramadan, his work with Matt Damon, his friendship with Wynton Marsalis, and his confidence in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar chances.

A cowboy (Adrian Pasdar) meets a pretty, young gal at the local saloon and discovers too late that her kiss includes a double-pronged love bite of vampiric proportions…

Remember all of those movies you love to sit around watching and loving and talking about? Some of them were directed by women. You didn’t even know that. Did you, you chauvinist pig?

Uber sex-columnist Bethany Perryman takes a break from her usual assortment of tranny-loving, fetish-having columns and commands your attention to talk about something very important: a little girl-on-girl… er, girl-on-film.

Even though Kathryn Bigelow’s intense Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker hit theaters back on June 26, that sure won’t stop me from writing about it — it is perhaps the best film that will hit theaters in 2009.

Prior to writing this article I tried to come up with a better headline than “New Hurt Locker Poster Explodes,” but I just couldn’t.

We’ve been telling you for months now that Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming Iraq war action film The Hurt Locker is hands down the best movie of 2009. And we aren’t effing kidding here, people.

Screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow share the methods they used to create an intense, heartfelt combat film. We talk camera angles, mistaken journalists, and cleaning the dust off after coming in from the desert.

If there is one thing I know about Kathryn Bigelow’s war-torn gritfest The Hurt Locker, it is that it is one of those rare films with the power to shake you to your core.

In a very real sense, this movie is the first of its kind. The first boots-on-the-ground Iraq War film. It immediately places the audience in the dusty streets of Baghdad and refuses to let anyone leave until the end.

If you really need another reason to see Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker when it screens tomorrow night here at the SXSW Film Festival, the image inside should just about do it.