Last year, Nanette Burstein used comedic flair to tackle the difficulties of trying to love and make love with someone across the country. Two years before that, she (re-)burst onto the scene as the writer/director of the documentary American Teen, a simple movie focusing on the difficulties of the acne age that demands to be seen. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Burstein will now be showcasing the difficulties of battling with your soul mate in the work place. She’s signed on to direct Unforgiving World, a remake of a French film that focuses on a married couple who are both up for the same career-altering job at an architecture firm. Instead of giving one side of the story, the film will show different possible outcomes depending on who gets the gig (and presumably how they get it). Please Give writer/director Nicole Holofcener will write the script for Focus Features, but there’s no word yet on when to expect it on screens. The premise sounds like one bursting with possibilities, and working through Focus should give Burstein and Holofcener both the freedom to explore even the darkest of possibilities. As a comedy, it might need those depressing elements. It feels slightly in the same vein as The Promotion, but a version where Sean William Scott and John C. Reilly are a married couple. Try and get that image out of your head for the rest of the day. Burstein got her start in the documentary world, but with this, she’ll be [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]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr jumps feet first into the world of exploitation pictures. He rips off his shirt to show his prison tats when he sees Machete and then becomes a weapons expert to go head-to-head with George Clooney in The American. Finally, he cringes and rolls his eyes at yet another crappy real-life couple love story with Going the Distance. It’s sad when the highlight of his moviegoing weekend is a Lindsay Lohan nip slip.

You’re lying in bed with the clock reading some un-Godly hour in red analog, and you reach out your hand to find only the cold space of the other side of your bed. You want to pull the one you love close to you, but you can’t, because they’re gone. They aren’t on vacation or out of town for work. They are – for the foreseeable future – living in a completely different city. Most people have found themselves in this position. Even though the concept of the long distance relationship was probably invented when the first tribe realized there was a second tribe (or at least when war starting sending soldiers away for long periods of time), the struggle to keep the fire burning with mileage looming in between is especially appropriate for an age where you can find love on the other end of an internet connection. It’s the challenge of cross-country romance that the main characters of Going the Distance find themselves facing.

If you miss American Teen when it hits theaters nationwide on July 25th, you are dead to me. As well, if we meet on the streets, I will kick your ass in honor of director Nanette Burstein and her awesome film.

Ever since I took in the film at its world premiere at Sundance in January, I have been curious to see how a studio would market such a documentary. I guess, now we know — you take the subjects, who are a diverse group of high school students from Indiana, and you put them in context with a John Hughes movie.

A new poster emerges from one of the best movies of the entire year thus far.

Nanette Burstein’s enchanting documentary about growing up in the midwest shines through as one of the best of Sundance 2008.