Gregg Araki's stoner comedy Smiley Face (pictured) mysteriously received only a token theatrical release in Los Angeles and New York after receiving favorable reviews (including two from our own Jette Kernion and Monika Bartyzel) from a short run on the festival circuit. Now the rest of us can see it. The DVD from First Look includes a "making of" featurette; look for Erik's review of the DVD later on today.

Danny Boyle's 'space mission to repair the biggest star in the sky,' better known as Sunshine, inspired Nick Schager to describe it as "a gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity." You know what that means -- it should be perfect on DVD! Fox Searchlight's release includes an audio commentary by Boyle, two short films with intros by Boyle, deleted scenes, web production diaries and an alternate ending.

I loved Emanuele Crialese's Respiro, which featured a great performance by Valeria Golino, so I'm eager to catch up with his latest film, The Golden Door. Eric D. Snider said that this "story of an Italian family emigrating to America circa 1900 ... completely immerses us in the images and sounds of its world." The Miramax DVD has a "making of" feature and an introduction by Martin Scorsese.

Black Irish should play very well on the small screen. As I've written before, the film "revolves around a sterling, thoroughly engaging performance by Michael Angarano as a high schooler in Boston coming to grips with his family and his future; the script and direction by Brad Gann is solid and features a few surprising, gentle twists." The DVD from Anywhere Road Entertainment includes a commentary track and a "behind the scenes" feature.

Also out this week: Eagle vs. Shark, "(in some ways) even better than Napoleon Dynamite," per Scott Weinberg, DarkBlueAmostBlack, "a subtle, rewarding exploration of family," according to Martha Fischer, and Klimt, an unconventional bio-pic by Chilean director Raúl Ruiz.

Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours is back on the charts this week, playing on one lone screen, in Denver, according to my information. Among its other qualities and achievements, it marks the fourth collaboration of director Oliveira and actor Michel Piccoli (a fifth, a short segment in an anthology film, appeared earlier this year). At 81, Piccoli is practically a living legend, having worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Mario Bava, and many other greats. He also appears in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 Le Doulos, currently re-released on 2 screens. It's a delicate relationship between director and actor; Piccoli and Oliveira seem to be developing a comfortable working relationship in which each brings out the best in the other. This has happened relatively few times over the past century. When it happens, it can be very exciting, but when a director and an actor don't click, everything can fall to pieces.

Milos Forman has coaxed and guided some great performances over the years, notably Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. But he has rarely been praised for directing women, as evidenced by his awkward handling of Natalie Portman in the awful Goya's Ghosts (37 screens). The movie earned advance attention for its nude/sex scene, but will probably be remembered for fitting Portman with a set of humorously bad fake teeth and for her self-consciously dazed walk, newly released from prison, through a chaotic town square. Forman may be to blame, but Portman is out there, on the screen, all alone and in front of everyone.

By now, I think most of us have given up on ever seeing that Trainspotting sequel, so at least we can get the next best thing, another Danny Boyle film. Variety reports that Celador Films and Film4 have given the green light for Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. Slumdog will Boyle's first film with Film4 since working with them on A Life Less Ordinary, Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. Slumdog is based on the true story of a young street kid who goes on to be a champion on the Indian Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But according to Boyle, the film is really a love story. Boyle describes the film as, "a love story set in the most extreme city on earth. The Maximum City -- Mumbai. From its slums, a kid challenges for the biggest prize on world television. All he knows is that the girl that he loves - and whom he has lost in the chaos of Mumbai - watches the show every night ... if he can stay on the show as long as possible, he might find her again".

Starring newcomer Dev Patel in the lead, the film was written by The Full Monty scribe, Simon Beaufoy. Boyle has always been drawn to different projects, ranging from horror to musicals, so a romance film isn't that far from the realm of possibility for the director (you can also read James' round table interview with the director here). Slumdog is set to start shooting on location in Mumbai this November.

The latest on the Trainspotting sequel is that it all depends on when John Hodge's screenplay is ready. At least, that's what novelist Irvine Welsh has told an audience in Edinburgh, according to Empire magazine. Welsh wrote the book of Trainspotting and of its sequel, titled Porno, and this week he's at the Edinburgh Film Festival promoting his directorial debut, a short film called Nuts. When asked about the status of the Porno adaptation during a Q&A, Welsh claimed it's all about the status of the script. Of course, Hodge, who earned an Oscar nomination for the first Trainspotting, turned in a draft at least as early as March of this year. Sure, it's probably being tweaked and whatnot before director Danny Boyle goes into production with it, but we've already been given the real reason for the delay.

No, it doesn't have anything to do with Boyle's falling out with Ewan McGregor, who starred in the original film, and maybe has actually agreed to do the sequel. The main reason Trainspotting 2 hasn't been made yet is because Boyle wants the cast to be at least 20 years older than they were in Trainspotting 1. That would put the shoot at least nine more years down the line. If the filmmakers want authenticity, anyway. As recent as Boyle's promotion of his latest film, Sunshine, the director insisted that Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie and whoever else returns be middle-aged. The point of the sequel is that they're at a time in their life where they're too old to keep pushing the limits of their bodies. Unless Welsh knows something completely new, he's simply out of the loop and spouting incorrect info.

The novelist, and now film director, also told the Edinburgh audience about The Meat Trade, a feature film he's scripted, which will be directed by Antonia Bird (Ravenous) and will star Colin Firth and Robert Carlyle as a duo who murders people in order to steal and then sell their body organs. Welsh is also currently adapting Alan Warner's novel The Man Who Walks, which is about a one-eyed man who robs his local pub of its World Cup lottery. His latest book, a collection of short stories, titled If You Liked School, You'll Love Work, hits U.S. bookstores September 4.

From surfing through the early mixed reviews, I had the impression Danny Boyle's meditative science fiction drama Sunshine was not generating much excitement, a feeling reinforced by Nick Schager's Cinematical review ("a gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity"). While it may not be winning unqualified raves, Rotten Tomatoes estimates that 68% of reviews were positive, more than 12,000 IMDb readers have rated it as 7.3 out of 10 and US theater-goers flooded into the ten theaters where Fox Searchlight opened it on Friday. Leonard Klady at Movie City News estimated that Sunshine earned $223,400 over the weekend for a healthy $22,340 per-screen average. It will expand to more than 400 screens next Friday.

Sicko expanded even wider into "scores of cities that never have a documentary come to their local theater," according to director Michael Moore; it dropped only 30% from its previous week of release and has now grossed more than $19 million, overtaking Waitress to become the top-grossing "limited grosser" for the year. Sicko is playing more than 1,100 locations. In its second week of release, Talk to Me averaged a very good $9,250 per-screen average, dropping just 17% while adding three theaters.

Cashback played on nine screens and earned an estimated $12,800 for Magnolia before its DVD release on Tuesday. As Kim Voynar wrote in her review, it's a funny movie well worth seeing, and I was glad I got to see it at a festival screening last fall. Among the other new limited releases, Klady estimates that the French-language comedy My Crazy Aunt had the second highest per screen average ($4,030), playing on 35 screens -- looks like it's only playing in Quebec, Canada. Distributor IDP sent Goya's Ghosts out onto 49 screens; Milos Forman's biographical costume drama starring Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman pulled down an estimated $150,000.

Facing a roundtable of interviewers in San Francisco, director Danny Boyle's animated and enthusiastic talking about his new science-fiction epic, Sunshine, which follows a group of astronauts on a desperate mission to re-start the sun -- gesturing with his hands to show the narrow story constraints of sci-fi as a genre, leaning back and forth as he relates the differences in tone between his latest film and his previous work. Boyle burst onto the scene with his debut film, 1994's Shallow Grave; he followed it up with an impressive string of projects that leapt from genre to genre: Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Millions. Some of Boyle's films have been considered flops (notably The Beach, the multi-million dollar Leonardo DiCaprio-led adaptation of Alex Garland's novel) , but he's constantly tried to do something different -- a constantly moving point of innovation in a British film industry that too often seems awash in period-piece Jane Austen adaptation and wispy, wistful rom-coms.

Boyle spoke about researching sealed environments ("We couldn't get on an oil rig -- because of security -- but we could get on a nuclear submarine. ..."), putting his actors through a two-week pre-production 'space camp' (" ... I had to promise them that there were no cameras -- that it wasn't a type of Big Brother sort of thing. ...") and much more. Cinematical's questions are indicated.

Cinematical: What was the biggest technical challenge in bringing the emotional arc of the story to life - and what was the biggest story challenge in bringing this very technical piece of 'hard' science fiction to life?

Boyle: They're both the same, really -- They're both about 'Can you create this star -- and not just create it as an impactful wonderful thing to see, but can you sustain it and grow it so it grows as an experience throughout the film so it gets bigger and bigger and more a part of their lives?' Because, in a way, that's the emotional relationship in the film -- their relationship with the sun, what happens with it, how it kills them off gradually, or how they grow into it or learn to accept it, their relationship with it. And it was trying to sustain it. Because you can create impact (claps hands together to suggest a blast of sunlight): WHOOOOM! SSSSCH-OOOOOOWWW! But after about five seconds of that, it's just ... white. And really boring. So one of the basic ways we (built the experience) is that we made the inside of the ship, we made everything non-orange or red. It sounds boring and trite, but it works, believe me. It's an old, old trick: You rob the audience for maybe as long as 15 minutes, they don't get ... (reaches out to grab the hem of an interview participant's red dress) ... there'd be nothing like that allowed in the costume, nothing; everything had to be in the gray-green-blue range, and then you step outside (the spaceship of the film, into view of the sun) and it's like "Oh!" It's like you've been without it, like you've been starved of it.

That was one way that helped sustain it, really. It's the biggest technical challenge, really. Because obviously, you see the film through the actor's eyes, and they cant see anything of what we were creating, because it all took 9 months, a year for the CG. So the biggest technical challenge was creating things for them to look at. And I don't just mean pictures of the sun, I mean things that had a tactile impact on them -- whether light or dust or whatever it was, freezing water for Chris Evans. They're not thinking "He's told me to do it like this because eventually it's going to be like this. ..." It's like "Just react to what happens now to you." So you get a dust storm blown at you ... and then I replaced whatever I needed to replace with CG, but the actors are reacting to something tactile and tangible.

The sun is dying in Sunshine, but the familiarity of Trainspotting director Danny Boyle's latest makes one think an equally dire death is the sci-fi genre's aptitude for invention. A gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity, Boyle's film marries 2001 aesthetics with an Alien narrative to create a rather straightforward – and superficially entertaining – adventure devoid of much meaning. Talk of God, humanity and morality abound but Alex Garland's screenplay only lightly grazes such heady philosophical issues, instead investing most of its time and energy on decently drawn characters, an authentic sense of setting, reasonably taut set pieces, and custom-built showcases for dazzling CG sunscapes, twinkling light flares, and immense cascades of roiling fire hungry to fill the void of space. On a purely visceral level, Sunshine is never less than engaging, and frequently gripping. Yet the general emptiness of its head is frustrating given its pretensions of high-minded deepness, and the commonplaceness of its plot is ultimately dispiriting for a movie seemingly so in awe of the beguiling, near-incomprehensible mysteriousness of the vast universe.

Boyle's film charts the mission of those aboard Icarus II, who have been charged with traveling to the perishing sun and reigniting it with a nuclear bomb (dubbed the "Payload") in a last ditch effort to save Earth from the grip of a solar winter. Icarus II is a marvelously envisioned vessel, its interiors full of high-tech doodad-ery made raggedy after 16 months of use by its human inhabitants, and its exterior marked by a giant, circular solar-paneled shield that protects the craft from the sun's lethal rays. Less impressive is the standard-issue motley crew, comprised of a stoically heroic captain (Hiroyuki Sanada), a sensitive girl (Rose Byrne), an arrogant coward (Troy Garity), a nondescript nobody (Michelle Yeoh), an out-there shrink (Cliff Curtis), a cold pragmatist (Chris Evans), and a sympathetic hero (Cillian Murphy). Save for Evans, who finds himself stuck with the most thanklessly schematic of roles, the cast admirably infuses their sketchily conceived astronauts with a dollop of relatable personality. Their hopes, dreams, and quasi-religious musings, however, are mere specks on the cosmic windshield of Sunshine, whose primary focus always remains on its computer-generated intergalactic wonders.

I'm starting to feel a bit bad for Eli Roth, because I don't think he deserves all the negative vibes being thrown his way. Granted, I haven't seen any of his films, but I respect the fact that he's clawed his way to the top and, at the same time, managed to make films his way. He understands the business better than anyone (having worked practically every Hollywood job there is), knows which battles to fight ... and almost always wins. Unfortunately for him, Hostel: Part II arrived at a time when R-rated horror films (specifically those in the "torture porn" genre) were beginning to cool off. Add to that the fact that they took a huge chance releasing it right smack in the thick of summer blockbuster season -- coupled with a ton of illegal downloads -- and it was simply destined to fail. But taking a hit and moving on to bigger and better things was not in the cards for Roth, as a number of film personalities have taken cheap shots at the guy for no apparent reason.

The latest in a long line of folks eager to say something bad about Roth is 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle. Out promoting his latest flick Sunshine, Boyle told The NY Daily News that he isn't too fond of Roth's films. "His movies aren't even particularly well done," he says. "They're not even scary. They're horrible, but that's not scary. It's not suspense. And if you watch my films in detail, there's actually not a lot of violence in them. You get numb with violence very quickly." Of course, The Daily News does not provide the question which led to this answer -- I can't imagine the guy just began ripping Roth a new one out of the blue. But I am surprised to hear Boyle (a director I admire, and one who also happens to be a very nice guy) blatantly knock a fellow director. It makes me wonder whether there was ever any bad blood between the two.

Following the Hostel: Part II box office meltdown, Roth has decided to take a breather, recently saying that he won't be directing Cell (the Steven King adaptation reportedly scheduled to begin shooting later this summer) anytime soon. He added: "... I most likely will take the rest of the year to write my other projects. Which means I wouldn't shoot until the spring and you wouldn't see a film directed by me in the cinemas until at least next fall." What say you -- does Boyle have a point? Or is it unfair for all these people to knock a guy who's just trying to give fans what they want?

Since I've already seen Danny Boyle's Sunshine (due out in American theaters on July 20), I can safely say that the recently-released extended trailer is chock-full of spoilers. Granted, since you may not know the characters and story (save for the fact that it's about a group of astronauts sent to re-ignite a dying sun), the trailer might not mean much to you. But once you're experiencing the film up on the big screen, you'll soon realize just how much is spoiled in the trailer ... and may be pissed that you ever watched it in the first place. So keep all that in mind before checking this sucker out. Being the huge Boyle fanboy that I am, Sunshine was one of those films I was really looking forward to. Thankfully, I can honestly say that it was well worth the wait; the visuals alone are mind blowing, and the acting (Chris Evans and Cillian Murphy, especially) was pretty darn good too. That being said, this isn't Armageddon 2. Think more along the lines of Solaris or 2001 -- it's a quiet sci-fi flick that works more as a piece of art than anything else. But if you dig Boyle's style and you're in the mood for a little beauty amongst a summer full of fast-food blockbusters, then Sunshine is a must-see.

At the post screening Q&A with Boyle, he mentioned that he was currently shooting a film in Mumbai, India. We already knew that it was called Slum Dog Millionaire, and that it revolved around a guy who goes on the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Aside from that, nada. Well Boyle further explained the film to MTV, and has this to say: "It's based on a true story about this kid who goes on the Hindi version of 'Who Wants to be A Millionaire,' which is a very tough show to win, and he wins it. And [because he's illiterate] they think he's cheated. But actually the film shows how he happens to know the answers to the questions that [they] happen to ask." Boyle went on to say that, as with most things, it all has to do with a girl. "The real reason he is on the show is that he has lost contact with the girl he loves. All he knows is that she watches this show religiously, so he decides to go on the show and try and get [her] back."

What's funny about this is that during the Q&A, someone asked Boyle if he'd be interested in shooting in some other genres. One thing he noted was that he did not feel like he could do comedy (or romantic comedy, for that matter), because he's not a very funny person. And here it is his next film is about a guy going out of his way to land a girl. Go figure. When asked about the Slum Dog Millionaire score during our Q&A, Boyle admitted to being a huge fan of The White Stripes, and would love to bring Jack White out to Mumbai to have him play with some of the popular music over there. Now that's a fantastic idea! No word on a release date just yet, but I'd expect Slum Dog Millionaire (written by Full Monty scribe Simon Beaufoy) to hit theaters sometime next year.

Tomorrow (June 21) marks the summer solstice, and I guess to celebrate the beginning of the season, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) has sent Cinematical this compilation of trivia about the solstice and the sun. Boyle isn't just sharing us some random facts, though; this is obviously a promotion for his latest movie, Sunshine. It would seem to have made sense for Fox Searchlight to release the sci-fi pic, which stars Cillian Murphy, this weekend rather than exactly one month after, but whatever (its better than waiting until December). The movie has already opened in other parts of the world, way ahead of the appropriate date.

For those unaware of Sunshine, it is about a crew of spacemen sent to jumpstart our solar system's dying star. Yes, it sounds a little like an exo-version of The Core, but with Boyle and his usual screenwriter Alex Garland (since 28 Days Later, anyway -- he also wrote the source novel from which Boyle made The Beach) involved, Sunshine is sure to be much, much better. So far, the movie has a great score over at Rotten Tomatoes, though the reviews seem to be more enthusiastic about the look of the film than its story. Regardless, I am really looking forward to the pic; I haven't disliked one of Boyle's films yet, and I'd hate for this to be the first.

Click on the pic for the full-sized, Boyle-approved facts. For other, more directly-related promotional materials for Sunshine, check out the links to Cinematical's past coverage after the jump.