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Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

This week’s question: In honor of David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” what is the best movie about the afterlife?

Kate Erbland (@katerbland), IndieWire

It will come as no surprise to anyone that, as a child, I watched a lot of television. A lot. I was mostly obsessed with HBO — our single movie channel, number 2 on the dial; yes, my childhood TV had a dial, don’t ask — with intermittent deviations into mostly inappropriate mini-series (thus explaining my rarely disclosed expertise on “The Thornbirds”), and was pretty much given free range to watch whatever the hell I wanted, whenever I wanted. This is why my favorite...

Why Watch? Last year’s Transcendent Man dealt with Ray Kurzweil and the possible future where human life is extended thanks to computer memory, The Cloud and our own egos. In Tom Scott‘s new short, we find that death might be preferable once the lawyers have taken over. It’s straightforward sci-fi that pulls off the storytelling magic of placing you at the center of it – a movie that directs its attention to you and manages to nail down a universal humor. You’re dead. Now what? What will it cost? Only 5 minutes. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films...

This story first appeared in the March 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Ray Kurzweil, the 64-year-old futurist, will appear at SXSW Interactive for the first time March 12 to take part in a keynote conversation. An MIT graduate and subject of the 2009 doc Transcendent Man, he has developed groundbreaking speech-recognition programs, advanced music synthesizers and artificial-intelligence investment software through his Wellesley, Mass.-based Kurzweil Technologies. His fans range from Stevie Wonder, who challenged him to create Kurzweil Music Systems, to Roland Emmerich, who sought his advice on the sci-fi script Singularity he

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0:00 - Intro 9:10 - Headlines: Spike Lee to Direct Oldboy Remake, Neil Burger to Direct Uncharted, The King of Kong Remake Will Be a Mockumentary? 23:18 - Review: Horrible Bosses 48:50 - Review: Bad Teacher 1:09:30 - Trailer Trash: Jack and Jill 1:18:35 - Other Stuff We Watched: Cedar Rapids, Unknown, The Stunt Man, Princess Mononoke, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Just Go With It, Gulliver's Travels, Penn & Teller: Fool Us, Hot Coffee, Transcendent Man, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story 1:50:10 - Junk Mail: Mystery Melody and Character Themes, Medical Story, Time Travel Movies, Criterion Recommendations, It's Garry Shandling's Show, TV Shows that Grow On You, Canadian TV, Might as Well Junk 2:31:10 - This Week's DVD Releases 2:33:00 - Outro » Download the MP3 (72 Mb) [1] » View the show notes [2] » Vote for us on Podcast Alley! [3] » Rate us on iTunes!

A while back we had Dynamo Player's founder Rob Millis introduce us to this useful tool for Diy Distribution. But how do the filmmakers using it, feel about the Dynamo Player? Today, Felicia Ptolemy, one of the producers behind one very successful film, Transcendent Man, shares their thoughts on the Dynamo Player. I look forward to sharing more direct reviews of the tools we use to get our work made and seen. If you are filmmaker using some of the innovative tools and methods that both necessity and opportunity has offered Indie / Truly Free Film recently, let us know…...

Not much to choose from this week in terms of new releases on DVD and Blu-ray. The only two major titles are D.J. Caruso's I Am Number Four and the surprise CG animated hit Gnomeo & Juliet. Criterion is also putting out new versions of both Andrey Tarkovskiy's Solaris and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, while Platoon is hitting Blu-ray with a new 25th Anniversary Edition. In the non-fiction department, we have the Ray Kurzweil doc Transcendent Man and Martin Scorsese's Fran Lebowitz film Public Speaking. Will you be buying or renting anything this week? Check out a collection of the week's noteworthy releases after the jump. Amazon.com Widgets

For More Daily Movie Goodness, Visit Filmjunk.Com!

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we talk with people that want to live forever and punks who throw rocks at their faces all night long. The minds behind the book “Destroy All Movies!!!,” Zack Carlson and Brian Connolly, talk about how punks have been portrayed in movies from 8Mm to Zombie Nightmare. Barry Ptolemy, director of Transcendent Man, shares with us the challenges of shooting a documentary, the joy of getting to know Ray Kurzweil, and the recipe for eternal life. Plus, Katey Rich from Cinema Blend and Germain Lussier from /Film go head-to-head in our movie news quiz, and we all end up talking about Hunger Games. Naturally. Loosen up your tie and stay a while. Listen Here: Download This Episode On This Week’s Show: The Reject Radio Movie News Pop Quiz [The Beginning - 13:30]: Katey Rich vs Germain Lussier. A battle of titans if there ever was one. It...

For a very important reason, Transcendent Man begins with death. It’s a theme that pervades the entire discussion of technology, the future, and the direction that humanity might be headed in. After all, it’s that fear of death that propels us forward to delaying it, and, if Ray Kurzweil has his way, defeating it. If the idea of scientifically-created immortality (as opposed to the philosophical or Pearly Gate variety) seems outlandish, it’s only one of several put forth by Kurzweil in the film. Fortunately, it’s a movie about much more than just his predictions. It would be the dullest mind-blowing experience if it were, but instead of focusing too much on the science, the documentary creates a portrait of the man making the claims – complete with his failings and warmth. One version is a genius inventor who created a way for the blind to read. The other is a man haunted by the...

Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: I celebrate all levels of trailers and hopefully this column will satisfactorily give you a baseline of what beta wave I’m operating on, because what better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? Some of the best authors will tell you that writing a short story is a lot harder than writing a long one, that you have to weigh every sentence. What better medium to see how this theory plays itself out beyond that than with movie trailers? The Return of the Moonwalker Trailer Note: I can’t explicitly endorse getting high by way of huffing some rubber cement but, if you happen...

Ray Kurzweil believes that by 2030, machines will have attained something like a consciousness and that distinguishing between human and robot intelligence will be nearly impossible. This isn’t the logline for a science fiction thriller or a gimmicky Jeopardy! appearance. It’s the honest belief of an incredibly intelligent inventor, technophile, and habitual vitamin popper. You’ve got to keep your body strong if you want to live forever. So, yes, with his belief that humans may one day be able to live eternally by merging with machines (and having nanobots swim around inside our blood), Kurzweil seems pretty out there. The new trailer for Transcendent Man – a movie about Kurzweil and his ideas – seems equally as out there. Fortunately, it also seems at least mildly fair-handed unlike most documentaries these days. Check it out for yourself, and hurry up. You’re not going to live forever, you know: Shatner! It...

Ray Kurzweil is on a journey to bring his ideas to the world. We're featuring this official trailer (via Apple) for a indie documentary called Transcendent Man because I think it looks like an interesting story about the crazy/brilliant man known as Ray Kurzweil, a futurist with the theory of "the Singularity," a point in the near future when technology will be changing so rapidly, that we must enhance ourselves with artificial intelligence to keep up. At the same time, some think he's amassed a cult following and preaches ludicrous ideas, so it looks like there's an even bigger story behind Kurzweil. I'm curious to check it out. Watch below. Watch the official trailer for Barry Ptolemy's Transcendent Man: [flv:http://media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/TranscendentMan-officialtrailer.mp4 http://media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/TranscendentMan-officialtrailer.jpg 598 336] You can also watch the Transcendent Man trailer in High Def on Apple Chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor & futurist with a bold vision of...

Barry Ptolemy's eerie doc (Tff '09) chronicles the life of Ray Kurzweil, modern-day Nostradamus and leading theorist on Singularity - the notion that humans and machines will one day fuse creating superintelligent, immortal beings. The doc embarks on its worldwide tour this Thursday (2/3) and will be available on iTunes March 1 and on DVD May 24. Tribeca Film Festival programmer Genna Terranova on Transcendent Man: Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's foremost inventors. At age 15 he was designing programs that were adapted by Ibm and soon after machines that allowed the blind to read. Today he is hailed by some as a modern-day Nostradamus and dismissed by others as a crackpot. The "futurist" and best-selling author is a leading theorist on the "technological singularity" - a time when humans and machines will fuse in the next phase of bio-technological evolution, creating superintelligent, godlike beings that could conceivably live forever. The kicker is,...

A veteran of film and TV trailers and music videos, Doobie White is the editor (along with Peter Amundson and Fernando Villena) of the new action-thriller Gamer and worked on the film's digital effects at his post-production facility, Therapy. He also served double duty on the new documentary Transcendent Man (which premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival), a film that he both edited and executive produced. Just before Gamer's release, Mm spoke with White about the thrill of editing action movies.

A veteran of film and TV trailers and music videos, Doobie White is the editor (along with Peter Amundson and Fernando Villena) of the new action-thriller Gamer and worked on the film's digital effects at his post-production facility, Therapy. He also served double duty on the new documentary Transcendent Man (which premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival), a film that he both edited and executive produced. Just before Gamer's release, Mm spoke with White about the thrill of editing action movies.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil was never your typical entrepreneur. His first company developed omni-font optical character recognition, leading to the invention of the flatbed scanner, a technology he later sold to Xerox. He also invented the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition device. Inc. magazine ranked him the #8 entrepreneur in the U.S., calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." But along the way Kurzweil also became an influential futurist, publishing the bestseller The Singularity is Near, which details the moment when human intelligence and artificial intelligence will intersect, making our brains millions of times more powerful than they are today (for the Singularity-clueless, here's a primer; for the advanced, you can attend the annual Singularity Summit). A documentary about Kurzweil's life, Transcendent Man premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival,...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Queen to Play” Director Caroline Bottaro “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a …...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Queen to Play” Director Caroline Bottaro “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a …...

The Tribeca Film Festival has become quite famous for the quality of documentaries that plays there every year, and few are as intriguing this year than Barry Ptolemy's Transcendent Man , a portrait of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the man whose ideas have become the basis for a lot of everyday technology - things like the flatbed scanner, for instance. What Kurzweil might be best known for are his theories about the evolution of technology and how its exponential growth is going to lead to something he calls the "Singularity," a period where the pace of technological change is happening so rapidly that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Some might already feel that this is happening right now, but it's a somewhat scary thought when one realizes how...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Queen to Play” Director Caroline Bottaro “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a …...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” Director Damien Chazelle “American …...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Queen to Play” Director Caroline Bottaro “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a …...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” Director Damien Chazelle “American …...

Editors Note: Below are the links to a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival in the narrative and doc competitions as well as the Discovery section. The festival takes place April 22 - May 3. “Transcendent Man” Director/Producers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy “Which Way Home” Director Rebecca Cammisa “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench” Director Damien Chazelle “American …...

Boutique post house Therapy Studios has moved into a new facility at 2010 S. Westgate Avenue in Los Angeles. The location also houses a new color-grading suite.

"We believe our new model of the fully integrated creative postproduction house is the way of the future," executive producer and partner Joe Disanto said. "Specialists in each discipline work together as a team. Not only does this cohesive collaboration produce better, more creative work, it also streamlines workflow, which translates to speedier delivery and greater flexibility in budgeting."

Equipped with Quantel's Q-Color grading package, a 2K-projection system, and a 10-foot screen (as well as HD and Sd broadcast video monitoring), Therapy offers Di-style color grading for film, television and commercial projects.

Most recently, Therapy's Wren Waters graded work for Saturn, Cvs, DTS Sound and the feature documentary "Transcendent Man."...

Editor’s Note: This is one of several interviews, conducted via email, with directors whose films are screening at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. Transcendent Man (World Documentary Feature Competition) Director: Barry Ptolemy Synopsis: Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s foremost inventors. At age 15 he was designing programs that were adapted by Ibm and soon after machines that allowed the blind to read. Today he is hailed by some as …...

I know it looks dire as it's 28% lighter (at least so far) and minus an artistic director, but no fear, there's still more to come, and with what's been announced theirs some interesting sounding stuff, especially a film we wrote about briefly called Accidents Happen. Also premiering is the comedy Stay Cool and the Danish film Original, along with the North American premier of The Exploding Girl which we also wrote about.

Check the narrative features, world documentary, and discovery lineups after the break!

World Narrative Feature Competition

A compelling cross-section of bold creative visions from every corner of the globe come together in this year’s World Narrative Feature Competition. Presenting a diverse array of unique voices, this international film collection includes premieres from a wide range of directors, such as U.S. indie veterans the Polish brothers and Tony-nominated Conor McPherson, as well as exciting newcomers. Together, these...