When you look at this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress, one thing that sticks out is the number of nude scenes the actresses have appeared in. Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Angelina Jolie (Changeling), Kate Winslet (The Reader) - these are beautiful and mega-talented young women who have never shied away from on-camera nudity. Their nominations got me thinking about the nature of female sexuality in films.

After Dark Horrorfest sounded like a good idea - take eight independent horror films that deserve to be seen and given them theatrical distribution. Launched in 2006 by the Canadian filmmaker Courtney Solomon (An American Haunting), the annual event has unfortunately devolved into a weeklong shitfest. Every year I go, hoping the festival will build on the promise of its initial run, which showcased some solid fright flicks like The Abandoned and Wicked Little Things. And every year I go home sorely disappointed.

Latin Nominees for the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards

As we approach the end of the year, the award season begins for the best in film of 2008. One of the first ceremonies that just announced its nominees is the Independent Spirit Awards, the awards show for North America's independent film community. As for Hispanic and Latino nominations, we have four major nominees. On the Spanish side, the talents of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem were recognized, as both got nominations for their collaborative work in Woody Allen's flick Vicky Cristina Barcelona

When it comes time to hand out the best-of-the-year awards, movies released in December get all the love. This is partly due to the fact that studios have been saving some of their best products for the holiday season, but sometimes it seems like movie critics and members of the Academy Awards of Arts and Sciences suffer from memory loss. So I thought it might be fun to see what the first 11 months of the year had to offer and make a best-of-the-year list from that. Keep in mind that I still haven’t seen some of the most anticipated films of the season, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and Milk. I’ll write about those movies in future blogs. For now, here’s my nowhere-near definitive look at the best movies of 2008, listed in order of preference:

CINEMAD is the cinematic brother of FESTIMAD. Born at the same time, in 1994, in Madrid’s Revolver Theater. Since then CINEMAD has never failed in its annual appointment with the Independent and Cult Film Festival. Cines Renoir Film Festival is involved promoting and exhibiting short films. Genres such as gore and animation, and successful filmmakers such as Santiago Segura, Álex de la Iglesia and Alejandro Amenábar, have found CINEMAD to be their launching platform. Other filmmakers have had similar success.

BOO-enas Noches, guys and ghouls. Welcome to the first-ever Halloween edition of Jr’s Cineblog, where we will be dissecting the best terror films to watch if you want to get spooked… en Español!!! In this list, we will bring to you the top horror, thriller and suspense films produced in Spanish. So grab your chili con carne popcorn… and cuddle up next to that special Mamasita or Papacito, and grant them the protection and tranquility they need from oh-so-terrifying Spanish celluloid horror.

More than 700 people came out to the Aventura Mall on Thursday, Oct. 23, to attend the premiere of Director, a low-budget action movie shot in Miami.

It was a real coup for filmmaker Aleks Rosenberg, who both directed and served as the director of photography on the film. The maker of one previous feature, 2001's award-winning Zelimo, Rosenberg now teaches in the film department of Miami International University of Art & Design. He said he'd spent the last week-and-a-half working round-the-clock in the editing suite, making last-minute tweaks to prepare the film for its world premiere. The producers sent out invitations to more than 200 journalists, and the response was so enormous they had to rent out a second screen to show the film on.

Noticia de un Secuestro or News of a Kidnapping, from the renowned author and credited Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, will be embodied in a film version next year and reach cinemas in 2010. This is not the first work of Garcia Marquez (or Gabo, as he is popularly known) to be brought to the cinema. Of Love and Other Demons and Love in the Time of Cholera also had their big-screen adaptations.

Welcome one, and Bienvenidos Todos(Welcome All) to the most original Spanglish Cine Blog, exclusively on Openfilm.com. This CineBlog is called "Junior's CineBlog", Junior being yours truly, Me!...... and "...CineBlog" meaning "...FilmBlog" in our neighboring tougue, and second official language of the United States, Spanglish! That is right. This unique bilingual film blog is going to bring you the latest scoops on the hottest topics in the Hispanic film industry, bringing you stories on film releases, Latin film personalities as well as film events all over the world, all with the particular thread of the Spanish/Latin/Hispanic inclination.