The SCAD-sponsored 2011 Savannah Film Festival, Oct. 29 through Nov. 5, is bringing Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone to town for its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Rebirth. Director Jim Whitaker’s acclaimed 9/11 documentary (reviewed in this issue). At 2, 5 and 8 p.m. Sept. 11, Muse Arts Warehouse. Movies Savannah Missed (MSM).

No one in The Last Song ever utters the word Tybee. Not even once. Oh, someone does mention that the story is unfolding in Georgia, and a little sign about 90 minutes in reads "Tybee Island Baptist Church."

Judy Maltz, a journalism professor at Penn State University, had an amazing story to tell. Maltz, who produced and co-directed the film No. 4 Street of Our Lady, was descended from a family of Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of a woman who almost single-handedly saved the lives of 15 people by hiding them in her small home for two years, risking her life by feeding and caring for them all during the Nazi occupation of their small town.

Unless there’s a last–minute gold rush of five-star movies between now and the end of the year, the 2009 Oscars belong to director/producer Lee Daniels and his film Precious – Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire.

THE GREY ** After presenting Mexico City as the ultimate hellhole on Earth, Tony Scott's 2004 Man on Fire ended with a credit stating that the city was actually "a very special place." Sydney Pollack's 1993 The Firm assures us that Cayman Island officials look down on the sort of money laundering occurring in the film. And best of all, Irwin Allen's 1978 The Swarm gave a shout-out to our buzzing buddies by adding a ...

A DANGEROUS METHOD **1/2 As part of his four-score from 2011, Michael Fassbender turns up in A Dangerous Method as Carl Jung, the Swiss doctor often deemed the father of modern psychology. Watching him tackle Jung as a cautious, conflicted man, it's hard to see the same person who was so brooding in Jane Eyre, so, uh, magnetic in X-Men: First Class, and so raw in Shame. Yes, there's a reason so many of us ...

THE ARTIST ***1/2 The definitive look at the transition from silent films to talkies arrived courtesy of the 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain. The story about a talented nobody becoming an overnight success while an established performer simultaneously suffers a career crash'n'burn has been filmed ad nauseam, most recognizably in the various screen incarnations of A Star Is Born. And, unless one counts Charlie Chaplin's gibberish song in 1936's Modern Times, the employment of ...

SHAME *** Michael Fassbender went all James Brown on us in 2011, as the hardest working man in show business -- or at least in film -- appeared in leading roles in no less than four motion pictures. Fassbender was compelling as Rochester in Jane Eyre, as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method and especially as Magneto in X-Men: First Class, but it was his role in Shame that allowed him to most fully expose ...

THE IRON LADY *1/2 Taking Meryl Streep out of The Iron Lady and replacing her with just about any other actress would be akin to removing the meat out of a beef stroganoff dinner and replacing it with a Hostess Twinkie. The result would be a thoroughly indigestible mess, worthy only of being flung into the garbage bin. Yes, Streep delivers yet another note-perfect performance, although it must be said that 1) 2011 was such ...

What looked like a slam dunk for one picture throughout most of the awards season on a dime turned into a slam dunk for another movie. Yes, The Social Network may initially have had all the Oscar buzz, but lately, it's been all about The King's Speech.

THE BACK-UP PLAN * Jennifer Lopez's first screen outing in four years isn't a motion picture so much as it's a new form of Chinese water torture: Seemingly innocuous at first, it continues to pelt the viewer with one abysmal scene after another until insanity seems like the only logical result. Lopez stars as Zoe, a single woman who, tired of waiting for Mr. Right while her biological clock continues to tick away, elects to ...

The 82nd Annual Academy Awards will be held this Sunday, March 7, meaning we only have a few more days to mull over the possible outcome.

The Road Zombies seem to be de rigueur in today’s strain of post–apocalyptic motion pictures, yet this adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) offers nothing quite so fanciful. The undead shambling through this bleak movie’s ravished landscapes are, technically speaking, still human, though many have taken to eating human flesh, and all seem to be moving forward as though propelled by a natural instinct to survive at all ...

9 **1/2 Not to be confused with Rob Marshall's upcoming musical Nine (or, for that matter, with the summer hit District 9), this single-digit offering is actually director Shane Acker's expansion of his own Oscar-nominated short film from 2005. That animated work ran approximately 12 minutes; this new version clocks in at 80 minutes, shorter than most theatrical releases but still thin enough to outstay its welcome by at least a quarter-hour. Set in ...

Blast of Silence, an extremely well–regarded film noir from 1961, doesn’t really have any recognizable stars. The movie was written and directed by Allen Baron, who went on to make a mark, of sorts, as a TV director of such shows as The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels.

Back in the very late 80s, when hair bands were already flat and grunge music had yet to don its flannels, something weird appeared on the bill of my favorite all–ages club in Tucson, Az.

Shot on location in Zambia, Ghana, India, Guatemala and California, With My Own Two Wheels brings together the stories of five disparate individuals who use the bicycle as a way of making change in the world - "one pedal stroke at a time," as the film's producers like to say.

Although this year's Psychotronic Film Festival is populated by the usual weirdo cult movies and unfathomable foreign horror yarns, there are a few titles that stick out like a Siskel & Ebert sore thumb. They're "A" films that would not be out of place in Psychotronic Film Society chief Jim Reed's "other" series, Movies Savannah Missed.

Fred Stoller is the archetypical “where have I seen that guy before?” actor. A former standup comedian, the Brooklyn native has been in lots of TV stuff you’ve watched, from Scrubs to Everybody Loves Raymond to Wizards of Waverly Place.