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Culinary Zinema, the San Sebastian Film Festival’s hugely popular food-themed sidebar, opens Sept. 23 with “Mugaritz. No Bread, No Dessert,” (“Mugaritz. Sin pan ni postre”) which draws back the curtains to reveal the inner workings of the two-Michelin Star Basque restaurant, Mugaritz.

Produced by Movistar Plus+ and Fonte Films, the documentary is directed by Paco Plaza who was given access to the inner sanctum of the 26-year old restaurant located just outside the tony city of San Sebastian. In the documentary, Plaza follows Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz and his team as the restaurant closes its doors to the public for a few months. During this time, they deliberate and craft a new and edgy gastronomic experience for the coming season.

By late April, Mugaritz opens with the aim of testing the curious diners who pick up the gauntlet and accept the challenge. The staff is encouraged by the chef de cuisine “to surprise,...

The year is 1974. In Barcelona, Spain, brothers Fernando and Alberto find themselves caught between the conflicting political realities of Francisco Franco’s fascist regime and the growing opposition movement. By day, Alberto takes part in underground revolutionary activities. But at night, he assists Fernando in the kitchen, where he works under a head chef.

As authorities intensify their searches for activists like Alberto, Fernando sees an opportunity to escape the turmoil. He leaves Barcelona with Alberto and their friend Francois for the coastal town of Cadaqués. There, Fernando lands a job at El Surreal, an eccentric restaurant run by the flamboyant Jules.

Jules has set himself an ambitious goal—to attract the renowned surrealist Salvador Dalí to dine at his establishment. He believes Fernando’s skills in nouvelle cuisine can help make this dream a reality. Meanwhile, Fernando finds inspiration in the local cuisine and culture. But will the political...

José Andrés is a renowned name globally, as well as locally in Washington’s Dmv (District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia) area. Ambassadors, civil servants, businessmen, tourists, locals and celebrities — including Rob Reiner, Paris Hilton, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, LL Cool J, Billy Porter, bandleader Chucho Valdés, NBA pro Kyle Kuzma and NFL player Kevin Zeitler — have all dined at his restaurants in DC, of which there are 8 and all are within a walking distance of each other.

One of his most famous concepts is The Bazaar By José Andrés, which has locations in Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. The latter sits inside the Waldorf Astoria Washington hotel — which opened in 2022 — and it’s a perfect match, as the chef and hotel management share the same ethos and values for diversity and inclusion.

Andrés originally was supposed to open his restaurant in what was then the Trump International Hotel.

Not long after the Miami episode of Netflix’s hit show “’Street Food: USA” dropped, its Emmy-nominated director Mariano Carranza received an Instagram message. It was from Gastón Acurio, Peru’s preeminent chef-restaurateur of Astrid & Gastón fame, but Carranza thought it was a prank. It turned out to be the man himself. His request: “Could Carranza tell the story of his culinary school Pachacútec?” Thus began a collaboration that resulted in a moving documentary, “Pachacútec, the Improbable School,” that traces three former alumni and their journeys.

Its trailer, unveiled exclusively in Variety, opens with a group of select students walking up a sandy path to what celebrated Catalan Chef Joan Roca of three-Michelin-Star El Celler de Can Roca describes as “an oasis of culinary knowledge in the middle of a desert.”

And the school is literally in the middle of a desert, on the outskirts of Lima. Founded by Acurio...

David Pujol, whose enchanting drama “Waiting for Dalí” premiered at the Malaga Film Festival on Sunday, has a new feature film project and an international TV series in the works.

Pujol has just completed the script for “Rehearsal for a Kiss,” the story of a passionate yet hapless movie theater owner in Barcelona whose love of classic movies has left his cinema in a precarious position. On the verge of losing the family business, he seeks help from his uncle in America, who has made a career for himself as a character actor in Hollywood. A flashy, larger-than-life personality, the uncle returns to his native city after 40 years to help his nephew save the theater while also reconnecting with his own past.

“The Flash Game,” meanwhile, is conceived as an eight-part series set in the 1960s world of paparazzi between Rome and London. It focuses on the rebellious son of a British publishing tycoon who,...

In a rare move, Barcelona-based Film Factory Entertainment has snapped up world sales rights to documentary “Mibu, The Moon in a Dish”, which opened the Culinary Zinema sidebar of the San Sebastian Festival Sept. 19.

The feature debut of Spanish filmmaker Roger Zanuy, the documentary transports audiences to members-only Tokyo restaurant Mibu, which has greatly influenced some of the most prominent chefs in the world, including Spain’s Ferran Adrià (El Bulli), Jose Andrés, also renowned for his humanitarian work, as well as Italy’s Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana, among several others.

“We don’t handle that many documentaries but this film really captivated us; it has great international potential,” said Film Factory managing director, Vicente Canales. The sales company has secured worldwide rights, excluding Spain, he told Variety. His love of Japanese culture was also a deciding factor, he said.

For the first time, Hiroyoshi and Tomiko Ishida, the...

The absurd path of this silly and rather enjoyable animated movie is all the more startling because it turned out kind of…decent. It all started in 2010 when screenwriter and eventual co-director Scott Christian Sava wrote an innocuous family comedy about a man who saves his family’s circus with the help of some magic cookies that can turn people into animals. The journey to get it made was almost as strange: “Animal Crackers” scored investment from Harvey Weinstein three years later, a flotilla of Chinese firms agreed to put up the rest of the money, “Mulan” co-director Tony Bancroft came aboard to help steer the ship, and “Despicable Me” character designer Carter Goodrich was hired to help with the animation. With those pieces in play, a rather astonishing variety of famous voices came aboard to help bring the story to life.

John Krasinski — at that point still two years...

It’s no insult to any documentary about a restaurant, or a celebrity chef, to say that it’s a piece of food porn; the insult would be to say that it isn’t. Yet what sort of food porn, exactly, is “Constructing Albert”? The movie is a portrait of Albert Adrià, the Barcelona-based chef who worked, for years, alongside his older brother, Ferran Adrià, who was the mastermind of elBulli, the visionary hillside palace of Spanish gastronomy that was thought of as the number-one restaurant in the world. (It closed in 2011.) At elBulli, the Adriàs perfected a brand of culinary indulgence that was one part pleasure, one part postmodern sci-fi; they created flavors and textures of a surreal deconstruction designed to revolutionize the very concept of what it meant to experience a piece of food on your tongue. There is low-end cuisine, and there is high-end cuisine. This...

The One Drop Foundation, Guy Laliberté’s international non-profit organization dedicated to providing access to safe water, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary by launching ‘10 Waves of One Drop.’

This series of fundraising initiatives will offer unique celebrity experiences through Charity Network’s online auctions and sweepstakes to benefit One Drop, with half of the proceeds going to the celebrities’ charities of choice.

“10 Waves of One Drop is a creative and atypical celebration of the power of generosity,” Guy Laliberté said. “Since One Drop’s inception, we were lucky enough to count on the support of dozens of celebrities who share my desire to change the world in a bold and positive way. For our 10 years, I have asked them to join us with their charity of choice, so that this online celebration can generate an impact not just for One Drop, but for 10 other extraordinarily important causes.”

In just a decade,...

The signature moment in each episode of Netflix’s Emmy-nominated “Chef’s Table” is no more than a succession of plates. Composer Duncan Thum’s melodramatic strings herald abstractions of texture and color, labeled as if on view at the Met: A rough pile of gray shards and purple flowers spattered with orange liquid (Grant Achatz’s “Graffiti, Carrot Spray Paint, Wild Mushrooms”); a wood husk filled with delicacies in the guise of dirt, twigs, and moss (Dominique Crenn’s “A Walk in the Forest”). Each montage is an expression of the belief that haute cuisine is high art, one shared by the series’ renowned subjects. “There [are] other disciplines that we can draw on for inspiration,” Achatz remarks. “There are no rules. Do whatever you want.”

For a series defined by cuisine that defies convention, however—gold-leafed ants and pillows of nutmeg air, flights of fancy and sleights of hand...

Noomi Rapace to play seven sisters in What Happened to Monday?, co-starring Glenn Close.

Paris-based Snd has boarded Tommy Wirkola’s upcoming high-concept sci-fi action film What Happened to Monday?, starring Noomi Rapace and Glenn Close.

The previously announced project, which has been in development for some time, is produced by Vendome Pictures and Raffaella Production and fully financed by Snd, which will handle French distribution rights as well as international sales.

The partners announced on Wednesday (May 6) that the production is due to shoot in Bucharest late July.

“Working with Vendôme pictures and Raffaella productions to produce this project with us is a thrill. They have found and polished a gem of a story we are excited to bring to the screen. These producers have an amazing track record. We are thrilled to work with those two partners,” said Lionel Uzan, director of acquisitions and international sales at Snd.

It is a sixth...

Our New View film season kicks off with a study of the brilliant chef Ferran Adrià and his groundbreaking restaurant El Bulli. Available in the UK and Ireland only

Reading on mobile? Click here to watch El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

Welcome to day one of the New View film season: a five-part celebration of cutting-edge documentary-making that aims to cover all bases. We're kicking off with El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a profile of the legendary Spanish restaurant which rose to worldwide renown under chef Ferran Adrià. It pioneered the notion of "molecular gastronomy", won its third Michelin star in 1997, and closed in 2011.

Here's what what Observer film critic Philip French thought:

This film is a memorial to a peculiarly elitist culinary aesthetic where everything is new, original, cutting edge, following the master of "molecular gastronomy" on one of his last big years. The theme of the year is water in all its forms,...

Vendome Pictures will produce and finance "El Bulli", a partly fictional film about world-famous Spanish chef Ferran Adrià and his now closed restuarant elBulli.

The story will be set in the final year of the restaurant and offers an inside-the-kitchen look at the intense passion, creativity and tedious work unfolding nightly.

Inspired by Lisa Abend’s book "The Sorcerer’s Apprentices," David Wilson ("The Man From U.N.C.L.E.") has written the screenplay.

Philippe Rousselet, Jeff Kleeman and John Lesher will produce, and shooting aims to begin later this year.

Source: Screen Daily...

Vendome Pictures will produce and finance "El Bulli," a fictionalized feature based on the the world famous chef and molecular gastronomer Ferran Adrià and his restaurant, elBulli. While no director is currently attached, the script is already written. It comes from David Wilson, who was inspired by Lisa Abend’s book "The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli." The chef and his restaurant were also the subject of Germany's 2011 documentary, "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress," which is currently streaming on Netflix. More on the film and Abend's book below. Vendome's Philippe Rousselet states, “We are excited to be a part of this film and to work with an innovator like Ferran who has revolutionized cuisine by creating his own genre of food. We look forward to attaching a director to this film that will be able to capture the adventure of training in.

Vendome Pictures announced today that it has come on board to produce and finance El Bulli , a fictionalized dramatic feature film based on world-famous Spanish chef Ferran Adrià and the restaurant he built into the world's foremost gastronomic mecca, elBulli. David Wilson wrote the screenplay which is inspired by Lisa Abend's book "The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli." Vendome Pictures. CEO Philippe Rousselet will produce the project along with Jeff Kleeman and John Lesher. Vendome is currently seeking a director with plans to start production this year. Rousselet stated, .We are excited to be a part of this film and to work with an innovator like Ferran who has revolutionized cuisine by creating his own genre of food. We...

It was hard to whittle down my favorite movie posters to a straight top ten this year. There was no absolute stand-out like Chris Ware’s Uncle Boonmee last year, and the majority of film posters continue to be depressingly rote and uninspired, even though the explosion of Diy illustration has started to make inroads into the world of commercial film promotion. As a symptom of my indecision I have tended to group posters together more than usual; laid out like this the year doesn’t look half bad.

1. Wreck-it Ralph (with The Lorax and Life Of Pi)

On its own the Wreck-It Ralph teaser would still have been one of the best posters of the year—a wittily simple 8-bit pixellated key-stroke of genius that compresses a blockbuster 3D extravaganza into a flat, three-color arrangement of squares and tells everyone walking by exactly what they need to know (except...

This elegant German documentary looks admiringly at the world-renowned Spanish restaurant created by German Dr Hans Schilling and his Czech wife, named after their French bulldogs and run from 1987 to 2011 by Ferran Adrià, an intensely serious fellow. Two million people applied for the 8,000 bookings taken every year, and in 2011 it closed because it was losing too much money. (Its principal source of revenue has been books and other byproducts.) It will reopen in 2014, as a culinary academy.

Every year, the restaurant, located in the idyllic coastal community of Cala Montjoi, closes for six months so that Adrià and his two chief assistants can move into Barcelona, two hours' drive away. There they experiment on new dishes for their 35-course menus, which no patron is given the opportunity to challenge. Nothing could be further removed from the McDonald's cooking academy in East Finchley.

So this film is a memorial to a...

Dr Seuss' The Lorax (U)

(Chris Renauld, Kyle Balda, 2012, Us) Zac Efron, Taylor Swift, Ed Helms, Danny DeVito. 86 mins.

Dr Seuss's most environmentally minded story was a natural choice for movie treatment, but as with so many others (How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who!), the temptation to "expand" on the original runs out of control. Seuss's elegant tale of a land where they paved paradise and cut down all the Truffula trees has been injected with all the compulsory gags, subplots, musical numbers and painfully bright landscapes that family animation is now deemed to require, making for an eco-tale that's packed with artificial additives.

Searching For Sugar Man (12A)

(Malik Bendjelloul, 2012, Swe/UK) 86 mins.

An inspiring documentary that successfully rehabilitates the reputation (and perhaps more) of Sixto Rodriguez, a 1970s Detroit troubadour who never found fame at home but unwittingly became huge in South Africa – where his...

This documentary about Michelin-starred restaurant El Bulli doesn't dig deep enough

In some ways, it's a pleasure to see a documentary about a restaurant and a top chef that doesn't use the phoney-baloney word "passionate". This film, by the German director Gereon Wetzel, about the ultra-exclusive Michelin-starred restaurant El Bulli near Roses on the Costa Brava, doesn't go in for this kind of life-affirming schmaltz, but there is something frigid and opaque about it. At the end of every summer season, the restaurant's charismatic boss, Ferran Adrià, closes it down, and key staff retreat for a "research" period in which they will develop new tastes, new textures, new ideas. Adrià is candid about coming up with dishes which go beyond "tasting good". This is where cuisine merges with conceptual art: a new taste combination might trigger new thoughts and feelings, as well as just making us say: "Oooh, yummy." Without any voiceover,...

Presentation. Texture. Overall homogeneous. These are some of the immediate hallmarks of truly high-end cooking. Before the dish is even tasted, these factors are already in play. In the new German documentary "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress", renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adrià espouses these values to the nth degree. And as the proprietor of El Bulli (also known as "elBulli"), one of the world's greatest, high-end "avant garde restaurants" (his words), charging around $360 per meal, it had better be. On the other hand, seeing how dining at El Bulli (a prestigious and influential Michelin 3-star operation located on the ocean tip of Spain) is a three hour experience consisting of at least thirty-five courses of some of the most complex original recipes in...

Chef Anita Lo has made quite a name for herself since she decided to treat her French language BA from Columbia as a prerequisite for becoming a classically trained French chef. Since then, she’s used that foundation as a springboard to include a wide variety of the world’s cuisines in her “Contemporary American” (read: exactingly tasty fusion) oeuvre. Lo has been featured on Top Chef Masters, Iron Chef America, The Martha Stewart Show, and was also named one of The Best New Chefs in America by Food and Wine in 2001.

Anita’s Greenwich Village restaurant, Annisa, means “women” in Arabic. The restaurant website describes the menu as made up of “flavors inspired by her Asian roots, her travels, and seasonal influences with her classic French technique,” and the wine list primarily contains wines made by female vintners or from women-owned vineyards.

In her new, lushly photographed cookbook, Cooking without Borders,...

It took over 20 years, but Antonio Banderas and famed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar have teamed up again, and it’s a reunion that was worth the long wait.

Decades after “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” Banderas and Almodóvar are back at it with “The Skin I Live In,” a brilliant thriller centered around some seriously dark themes.

Banderas plays a plastic surgeon testing synthetic skin on a patient who looks suspiciously like his late wife -- a tough role, for sure -- and Banderas credits Almodóvar for giving him the opportunity to deliver another banner performance.

You haven’t worked with Pedro Almodóvar in a long time.

It has been beautiful and difficult, because Pedro loves to work from scratch and reinvent himself, and reinvent you too as an actor. That means you go into territory that is unknown and take a leap of faith.

Need to get your "free" on? The Whole Foods Sunset Supper Cinema tonight features Hook at the Lamar location. On Wednesday, Cine Las Americas presents Rosa blanca (White Rose) plays at the MacC as part of its free "Literature in Mexican Cinema" series. Plus, you can find free screenings during the week as part at various Austin Public Library locations.

You have one more chance to catch Austin Chronicle cover-story filmmaker Heather Courtney's Where Soldiers Come From (Jette's review), on Saturday at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz. If you haven't already seen it, it's another outstanding locally made film we can't recommend enough.

Cine Las Americas also presents Octubre at the Alamo Village on Sunday. While this movie isn't free, it did win the 2010 Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. Check the Alamo website for more.

Movies We've Seen:

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (pictured above) -- A documentary...

Opening with a headshot of chef Ferran Adrià sampling a luminescent fish popsicle in the dark, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress immediately lets you know this isn't just another food documentary. The movie returns to Austin after screening at SXSW this year for a run at Violet Crown Cinema.

A pioneer in the molecular gastronomy movement, Adrià is a controversial chef whose legend is based on the extreme re-imagining and deconstruction of food both common and exotic, and whose restaurant was considered the best in the world. While some dishes are as visually sensual as a Georgia O'Keefe painting, some are more remiscent of an Edward Weston photograph, transcending the commonplace. What looks like a peanut in the shell may actually be completely edible, with a salty "shell" enveloping a liquid peanut, or a mojito cocktail contained within sugarcane.

At the beginning of the film, Adrià and his staff are...

Teen heartthrob Joe Jonas is best known as a member of the Jonas Brothers, but he may pursue a future in the food world someday.

In a lengthy new profile in the New York Times, food gets top billing. Jonas cited Texas chef Tim Love, Los Angeles guru Susan Feniger, Italian master Mario Batali and el bulli chef Ferran Adrià as his culinary inspirations. He hopes to start a food blog someday.

“I don’t really get star-struck ever, but when it comes to chefs, I will sometimes get nervous,” Jonas said. “If there’s a chef I really like, I will freak, because I think their talent is so different from what I do.”

Jonas recently appeared as a judge on Top Chef. What do you think of his love of cooking?...

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? Where Soldiers Come From Trailer Documentary filmmaker Heather Courtney looks to have made a movie that keeps the embers of war stoked in our collective consciousness.

Nestled in a picturesque spot along a bay on Catalonia’s Costa Brava in Spain, the three-star Michelin restaurant El Bulli is home to Ferran Adrià, considered by many colleagues and foodies to be the world’s most innovative chef. He’s a culinary avant-gardist who’s strongly associated with molecular gastronomy, an emerging field that fuses cooking with the rigors of scientific experimentation, bringing tools into play like liquid nitrogen, thermal immersion circulators, and syringes. Those lucky enough to eat at El Bulli are treated to a three-hour, 30-plus-course tasting menu that Adrià and his staff fill with bold ...

Alive Mind Cinema Eduard Xatruch, Oriol Castro and Ferran Adrià in ‘El Bulli’

There’s a lot of roasting, searing and skewering going on in theaters these days, and it’s not just critics taking potshots at “Zookeeper.”

Over the last few months, a slew of new food documentaries has been cooking up savory thrills for hungry audiences: in theaters, on TV and within the film-festival circuit. We’re not talking “Top Chef” quickfire quickies here. There are profiles of...

Say El Bulli and those in the culinary know may conjure up images of "molecular gastronomy," impossible reservations and a foodie paradise. Situated in an idyllic cove along Catalan, Spain's Costa Brava region, El Bulli boasts three Michelin stars and was named top restaurant in the world by "S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants" from 2007 - 2009. Its head chef, Ferran Adrià, is the tour de force behind El ...

Say El Bulli and those in the culinary know may conjure up images of "molecular gastronomy," impossible reservations and a foodie paradise. Situated in an idyllic cove along Catalan, Spain's Costa Brava region, El Bulli boasts three Michelin stars and was named top restaurant in the world by "S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants" from 2007 - 2009. Its head chef, Ferran Adrià, is the tour de force behind El ...

Say El Bulli and those in the culinary know may conjure up images of "molecular gastronomy," impossible reservations and a foodie paradise. Situated in an idyllic cove along Catalan, Spain's Costa Brava region, El Bulli boasts three Michelin stars and was named top restaurant in the world by "S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants" from 2007 - 2009. Its head chef, Ferran Adrià, is the tour de force behind El ...

by Vadim Rizov

Despite its title, El Bulli: Cooking In Progress isn't so much a food documentary as a depiction of a refined industrial process. For foodie types, Ferran Adrià's three-Michelin-stars establishment is one of the most important homes of molecular gastronomy (or, as he defines it when imagining nervous diners' reactions, all that stuff using liquid nitrogen). For Adrià, semi-industrial hardware and unnatural-sounding additives are as essential as olive oil and fresh produce, tools rather than novelties. The food that comes out is not just highly visual—crackable, frail desserts, unusual foams, unnatural bulbous curves—but meant to taste like nothing you've experienced, with familiar ingredients prodded into new forms. Some people think it's pretentious gimmickry, but Adrià swears his only goal is to surprise and delight.

The theatrical release of Gereon Wetzel's stone-faced portrait of the titular Spanish restaurant's 2008-09 year is timed to coincide with...

Forget molecular gastronomy and the haute cuisine style which has turned the world's most famous chefs into wild scientists. A new style of cooking is heating up as home chefs and the pros looked to the distant past for inspiration.

Avant-garde cooking is having a very good year. The cooking style was recently canonized in Nathan Myhrvold's lavishly photographed, six-volume tome Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. High priests of haute cooking, Ferran Adrià and Wylie Dufresne, best known for bringing laboratory techniques to the plate, traded in their whites for tweed and stepped into the classroom at Harvard. And on the Syfy channel, Top Chef alum Marcel Vigneron puts molecular gastronomy on display in Marcel's Quantum Kitchen.

Related story on The Daily Beast: Summer's Hottest New Restaurants

But there's another movement afoot in lay cooking circles, one that's looking backward rather than forward. Home cooks are finding inspiration in the past,...

Alive Mind Cinema will be releasing El Bulli: Cooking In Progress, the definitive documentary about Ferran Adrià and the boundless culinary creativity and uncompromising methodology he orchestrates at his gastronomical mecca: El Bulli. The film will open at New York.s Film Forum on July 27th, followed by a nationwide release to select cities.

El Bulli, the three-star Michelin restaurant located outside Barcelona in the Catalan province of Girona, has received the S. Pellegrino World.s 50 Best Restaurants Award five times in the last decade, and in 2010 Ferran Adrià was named the Chef of the Decade by the same organization. Adrià is deemed a brilliant innovator, the father of molecular gastronomy, and sometimes a crazy chef. Each year for six months he and his staff sequester themselves to concentrate on creating and testing the new culinary wonders that will become their next 30-course menu. (The restaurant accommodates only 50 for dinner,...

Tech tycoon-turned-chef Nathan Myhrvold worked for over three years to serve up an addicting 2,438-page manifesto on the art and science of what we eat.

For a wunderkind who began his career as a research assistant to Stephen Hawking, went on to become chief technology officer for Bill Gates at Microsoft, and now leads an invention brain trust, producing a cookbook might suggest, well, a half-baked anticlimax. Or would, if the work in question could by any plausible definition be called a mere cookbook.

Related story on The Daily Beast: 4 Autumnal Desserts

There can be little fear of that for Nathan Myhrvold's much-anticipated Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which goes on sale March 7. In size alone, the six-volume set defies categorization, weighing in at 43 pounds (not counting a five-pound custom-made acrylic case). Then there's the outsize price tag: $650. (Online retailers Amazon and Barnes & Noble are advertising a...

The South by Southwest Film Festival announced its feature film line-up Wednesday, piling heaps of cinematic goodness on an already stellar program that includes Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, Duncan Jones’ Source Code, Ti West’s The Innkeepers, Conan O’Brien’s tour documentary, and the latest Simon Pegg-Nick Frost comedy, Paul, with Seth Rogen.

Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) returns to the festival with her latest film, Red Riding Hood starring Amanda Seyfried, after the writer-director spoke on a screenwriting panel in 2009.

Plus a few favorites from the Sundance Film Festival last month, like Tom McCarthy’s Win Win, Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and Max Winkler’s Ceremony.

I’m extremely excited, even if I’m already having flashbacks to intense sleep deprivation. Like the last two years, I’ll be on the ground covering as much of the festival as I can within the packed 9 days of screenings,...

Readers of Sound On Sight can be sure that we will indeed be covering the SXSW Film Festival once again. As previously reported, Duncan Jones’ latest film Source Code is opening the festival and there will also be premieres for the documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, Greg Mottola’s Paul, and Jodie Foster’s The Beaver. Now the full line-up has been announced it is incredible.

Hit the jump to check out the line-up, and be sure to visit our site during the event.

The 2011 SXSW Film Festival runs from March 11 – 19th in Austin, Texas.

SXSW Film Announces 2011 Features Lineup

Austin, Texas – February 2, 2011 – The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival is thrilled to announce the features lineup for this year’s Festival, March 11 – 19, 2011 in Austin, Texas. The 2011 lineup continues the SXSW tradition of tapping into the cultural zeitgeist, highlighting emerging talent and breakthrough performances and supporting first-time filmmakers.

The South By Southwest Film Conference and Festival announced this year's features lineup. The festival takes place March 11-19 in Austin, Texas.

There are a total of 130 features screening this year including 60 world premieres, 12 North American premieres and 16 U.S. premieres! This year the a total of 1,792 feature-length films were submitted, which is the most ever.

There are going to be some amazing films shown this yea. Opening night kicks off with Duncan Jones' Source Code (Moon). The fest rolls on with Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver, Greg Mottola‘s Paul, Sundance Grand Prize doc winner How to Die in Oregon, Errol Morris‘ Tabloid, Victoria Mahoney‘s Yelling to the Sky, Azazel Jacob‘s Terri. There will also be a special screening of Catherine Hardwicke‘s Red Riding Hood.

The Midnight and SXFantastic sections will be announced with the shorts program next week.

See the complete lineup below via...

The South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) just announced their entire 2011 feature film lineup, and there’s isn’t a lot of note, with regards to this blog’s focus.

Titles you should be aware of – all of which we’ve previously profiled on Shadow And Act – include, Victoria Mahoney’s feature film debut, Yelling To The Sky (which will actually make its world debut at the Berlin Film Festival later this month); plus Blacktino, the first feature film from writer/director Aaron Burns, a self-described “blacktino nerd from Austin, Texas,” who got his start at Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios doing visual effects; Benda Bilili, a documentary about a band of homeless, disabled Congolese; and last, but not least, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, a documentary about the black man that happens to be the man behind the puppet (which also played at Sundance).

There might be...

The South by Southwest Film Festival has announced their features lineup for the 2011’s Festival, which will take place March 11th to the 19th in Austin Texas. Read the full press release after the jump. SXSW Film Announces 2011 Features Lineup Austin, Texas – February 2, 2011 – The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival is thrilled to announce the features lineup for this year’s Festival, March 11 – 19, 2011 in Austin, Texas. The 2011 lineup continues the SXSW tradition of tapping into the cultural zeitgeist, highlighting emerging talent and breakthrough performances and supporting first-time filmmakers. The Midnighters and SXFantastic feature sections, along with the short film program, will be announced next week. “This is the most exciting moment for us. After a fantastic festival of discovery in 2010, we can finally unveil the line up for this year’s event,” says Film Conference and Festival Producer Janet Pierson. “SXSW prides itself on taking chances, sifting for...

By most accounts, no chef has been as important to modern-day cuisine as Ferran Adrià, the wizard behind Catalonia’s El Bulli, generally considered the world’s greatest restaurant: open half the year, limited tables, booked months in advance. His complex, vivid, idea-driven, controversial cuisine has changed the way diners, critics, and chefs conceive of food’s possibilities. He gets under the skin of hard-line food conservatives by insisting that food’s limits should be pushed, always. In his book Ferran: The Inside Story Of El Bulli And The Man Who Reinvented Food, veteran food journalist Colman Andrews is generally ...