Eager to get into a new genre of film (say, Slasher Pix) but not sure where to start? GreenCine has a great set of “movie primers” on everything from Weepies to Westerns.

“The text of Superbad was set in a digitized version of Arcimboldo, a typeface long attributed to the Italian engraver and silversmith Paolo Arcimboldo, who lived in Parma in the first half of the eighteenth century.” Thus begins Ben Greenman’s 416-word-long “A Note on the Type” [via Design Observer]

“A Norwegian art historian who came by my house shockingly remarked that I was looking at the television and listening to rock music at the same time. Then suddenly everything turns still. Movement plays an important role in the way I live and work.” I love this photo and this photo by Tom Sandberg (via Alec Soth). Cinematically speaking, the photos remind me of this still from The Limey and this poster for The Bourne Ultimatum.

A collection of stills from Martin Scorsese’s The Departed in which the motif of an X shape appears. Fascinating. According to Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez, “as an homage to Howard Hawks’ classic 1932 Scarface, Scorsese scattered Xs throughout the movie (some more subtle than others), using them as a symbol of impending doom” (via Kottke).

The 26th Best Movie Poster Ever, featuring 26 members of a pretty stellar cast of characters.

The now online-only Premiere magazine offers a list of the 25 Best Movie Posters Ever. Saul Bass dominates this list, and justifiedly so, but for something a little different, check out Erik Nitsche’s great poster for All About Eve, Steve Frankfurt’s fantastic (though uncredited) poster for Rosemary’s Baby, or Frankfurt’s restrained black-and-white poster for Downhill Racer.

Always pushing the envelope, Lars von Trier pushes movies ever closer to games with his newest film, “The Boss of It All.” As The Guardian reports, von Trier’s new film was filmed using “Automavision: a new way of filming without using a cameraman,” and plays a game called Lookey, which sends viewers on a visual treasure hunt, looking for imperfections or elements out-of-context in the film. “Von Trier has offered 30,000 Danish kroner (£2,700) to the first person in Denmark to identify all the film’s Lookeys, along with the opportunity to be an extra in his next film.”

“Perhaps because so many of his movies are nominal thrillers, […] Antonioni is sometimes seen as an anti-Hitchcock. […] Released the same year, Psycho and L’Avventura both confounded audiences by doing away, mid-movie, with their leading ladies. L’Avventura also shares with Vertigo a mesmerizing pace, an overwhelming sense of immanence, and a purposefully enigmatic causality. L’Eclisse rivals The Birds as an absurdist disaster film; Blow-Up elaborates on Rear Window; The Passenger could be a deadpan travesty of North by Northwest.” J. Hoberman on Michelangelo Antonioni.

Courtesy of the outstanding film blog / braintrust Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You, a comprehensive bunch of click-throughs for Saul Bass’s film titles.

We need more film reviews like this one: “We don’t even have to show our faces to reinvent ourselves. In a chat room, anyone can be a Ripley—or whoever. It’s a liberating time in the history of a protean nation, and also a conflicting one. ‘The American is always on the way to someplace else,’ Lewis Lapham once wrote, but perhaps never as quickly or universally as in the high-velocity world of right now. While Ripley has to laboriously scratch out a passport photo to trade in an identity, we can do it in a digital click.” Frank Rich, as only he can, opens up what the film critic is allowed to review and produces one of my top-five favorite film reviews ever on Anthony Minghella’s cerebral thriller of 1999, The Talented Mr. Ripley.