Surreal. That seems to be the common consensus about this film. It's the second directorial effort of Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi, following his acclaimed debut, Hukkle. Says the filmmaker:

"I would like to create a lasting, personal-authorial film, the story of a man tortured by eternal dilemmas, not actual ones. Past exists only in memories."

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What's the Movie About: Taxidermia is: Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.

The grandfather lives in his fantasies and on cold winter evenings he warms up his freezing little shed with his feverish dreams. Nothing can stop his fertile imagination. The father stuffs himself. For four years he was the first in his section in the Confectionary Industry. He is still unbeatable in chocolate wafers with an individual record of 2.98 (just as a comparison Igor Vostongonoff was the European champion in Sophia with 3.21.). The son stuffs animals. He was born one and a half kilos. Now he has less than one and a half minutes left. He goes in for something that nobody has ever imagined before.

Expect the best films to come out this December! If there is one film that truly brings in the excitement, it's none other than the latest teaming up between actor Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton - Sweeney Todd! This is the sixth collaboration between the two and also stars Helena Bonham-Carter (another Burton favorite) and Alan Rickman.

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What's the movie about?: Based on the Stephen Sondheim musical of the same name, Tim Burton's film adaptation stars Johnny Depp as "the demon barber of Fleet Street," Sweeney Todd.

After being wrongfully accused and sent away to Australia for fifteen years, Sweeney Todd (aka Benjamin Barker) returns to London. He find that his wife Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly) and daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener) have suffered severely at the hands of the very man who imprisoned him, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman). With the assistance of his former landlady, Mrs. Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter) of Lovett's Pies - the worst meat pies in London - Sweeney devises a plan to revenge his unjust imprisonment and the sad fate of his family.

German Director Marc Rothemund made waves with his last film, Sophie Scholl – The Final Days. Apart from both domestic and international success, the movie was also nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category. The historical drama starred German top actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie. While this film was serious and proper, Rothemund's next film is hilarious and wacky. Apparently, the director wanted to do something different - very different.

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Pornorama chronicles the Munich sex film industry in the 1970s and relates the story of two brothers, the aspiring young film-maker (Tom Schilling) who is forced to make an educational porn film to help out his older brother (Benno Fürmann). Schilling, who was exceptional in the Nazi film Napola, tries his hand at comedy and together with top German actor Benno Fürmann, leads a cast including Karoline Herfurth, Michael Gwisdek, Elke Winkens and Leonie Charlotte Brill.

"The structure of how to tell that story was quite compelling and challenging to me…And the other thing is, my father died in 2004 and he was very scared to die. I thought if I could have taken the fear of death away from my father, then I will be a good son... So I tried to do that... I mean he died, I failed him but maybe my children won’t be so scared. Or I won’t, " says director Julian Schnabel about his latest film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

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Aside from Romain Duris, Melvil Poupaud, Guillaume Canet and Benoit Magimel, Mathieu Amalric is one of France's most talented actors. In one of the year's most challenging roles, Amalric plays the lead in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Schnabel interprets the poignant memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, immobilised by a stroke aged 43, as a dreamlike collage of memory and fantasy. [ read more from the 51st London Film Fest ]

Documentaries have been in the limelight lately. Filmmakers have been trying to draw our attention to events currently occuring in nature, to our lifestyle, and yes, to global warming. While such documentaries as An Inconvenient Truth, Sicko, Supersize Me and others have gotten their share of attention, there is one little film with a big message that we also ought to see.

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It's called Sharkwater and it’s the baby project of Canadian filmmaker Rob Stewart. This man almost lost a leg trying to make this film ( not from a shark bite of course, but from contracting a flesh-eating disease as a result of spending too much time under water) and was once forced to run for his life when unscrupulous members of a crime syndicate tried to capture him. He's good-looking too -- in a celebrity kinda way! In fact, the press coined the name ‘shark stud’ to describe Stewart. That may sound amusing to some, but when we see how he did it, there is really no reason to make fun of the guy. Stewart knows the power of the media and getting much-needed publicity for his film, so he’s even game to ride out the media attention.

And yes, the movie IS about sharks and how people’s perceptions of this animal could eventually lead to its extinction.

With the buzz on Ellen Page getting stronger and stronger, we're sure you'd love to know more about her films, especially those made before Juno, her breakthrough movie that caused so much excitement in the film industry. One of these movies is the highly recommended Euro-Canadian production called Mouth to Mouth.

An iconoclast. That's the term many fans and writers are using to describe filmmaker Terry Gilliam. With such films as ‘Time Bandits', ‘Brazil', ‘Baron Munchausen', ‘The Fisher King', '12 Monkeys', ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', ‘The Brothers Grimm'... no one can say that Gilliam's work is anything but his.

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He was asked recently about how his films are almost always received with mixed reviews, and that more often than not, many change their minds and love it upon second viewing:

"Reviewers are often trapped in clichéd ideas of what movies are, and what storytelling is. And when you deal with these things sort of differently, they respond by rejecting it or being confused by it. They watch too many films, is their problem. "

Now, from Gilliam's resource site Dreams, comes the news of an upcoming film:

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fantastical morality tale, set in the present day. It tells the story of Dr Parnassus and his extraordinary 'Imaginarium', a travelling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom. Blessed with the extraordinary gift of guiding the imaginations of others, Dr Parnassus is cursed with a dark secret... [ read more ]

The second feature film from German-Turkish director Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven, is also Germany's entry in the upcoming Oscar Foreign Language Films race.

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"Best known for Head-On, Akin has, in a short period, risen to become one of the most significant voices of contemporary German cinema. While it may be a stretch to refer to him as heir apparent to Fassbinder, there is something in his realist style and readiness to engage in social and political issues that reminds one of the great master. " reports Piers Handling.

What's it About: Retired widower Ali ( (Tuncel Kurtiz) sees a solution to loneliness when he meets prostitute Yeter ( (Nursel Köse), Ali proposes to the fellow Turkish native to live with him in exchange for a monthly stipend. Ali’s bookish son Nejat ( (Baki Davrak), seems disapproving about his bully father’s choice. But the young German professor quickly grows fond of kind Yeter, especially upon discovering most of her hard-earned money is sent home to Turkey for her daughter’s university studies.

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Cahiers du Cinéma member Claude Chabrol is back! Just like fellow CdC member Eric Rohmer, the prolific French filmmaker remains active in his film career. This new film marks his second feature for the new decade, after Le Demoiselle d’honneur. The film is entitled Girl Cut in Two (La Fille coupée en deux). Piers Handling reports:

The Nouvelle Vague is back in force this year with new films by Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and, now, Claude Chabrol. Each new work by one of these masters remains an event, and none more so than Chabrol’s wicked and beautifully realized La Fille coupée en deux. He has always revelled in the human foibles of his deeply flawed but eminently recognizable characters, and here he rises to the occasion to create a superbly caustic tale of – as the title describes her – a girl cut in two.

"I love conspiracy theories. Once I read in the newspaper about a soap opera scoring the top ratings of the day and I thought: This can’t be! Then I thought: What if these ratings aren’t correct at all? What if a conspiracy is trying to dumb us down on purpose? Why haven’t I ever met anybody who has one of the black ratings boxes?" says German Director Hans Weingartner.

After White Sound and The Edukators, Weingartner's new feature film focuses on television ratings and the people that produces shows for the masses. Reclaim Your Brain also stars one of Germany's top actors, Moritz Bleibtreu.

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What's it about: Successful TV producer Rainer (Moritz Bleibtreu) has it all: big salary, luxurious penthouse, high life, hot car, even hotter girlfriend. The 30-something go-getter has reached the top by creating TV shows of the most stupid and vulgar kind. In his latest hit, a man gets the privilege of fathering a woman’s child if his spermatozoid wins a microscopic race to fertilize an ovum!

"I’m Not There is the name of a famously elusive, unreleased track from Dylan’s famed Basement Tapes sessions, and recorded with The Band in Woodstock in 1967, while Dylan was recuperating from his motorcycle crash. The song has been written about at length by writers as varied as Greil Marcus, Paul Williams and Don DeLillo, and is featured in the film both in its original form and in a powerful new cover by Sonic Youth (their first and only Dylan cover.) But to me the title evokes Rimbaud’s famous line (also in the film): I is another—and the theme of personal displacement that the film’s “multiple Dylan” strategy tries to illustrate." says director Todd Hayne about his new film.

Considered as one of the most anticipated films of the year, I'm Not There is an unconventional journey into the life and times of Bob Dylan. Six actors portray Dylan as a series of shifting personae—from the public to the private to the fantastical—weaving together a rich and colorful portrait of this ever-elusive American icon. Poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity, rock and roll martyr, born-again Christian—seven identities braided together, seven organs pumping through one life story, as dense and vibrant as the era it inspired.

"I hate titles with the word, ‘MR’ in them, so I thought it would be better to elongate the spelling to M I S T E R. I really love that Bobby Vinton song ‘Mister Lonely ’. It was really dramatic and over the top, but I like the story and the emotional range of Bobby Vinton’s voice in the song, so I wrote it into the movie. It seemed an obvious choice for a title because the main character is lonely and isolated in the beginning and end of the story." says Harmony Korine, the director.

Korine has been praised as an innovative director with his own unique set of vision and style in filmmaking. Mister Lonely is his third film feature after Kids and Gummo.

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What it's all about: A Michael Jackson impersonator lives alone in Paris and performs on the streets to make ends meet. At a performance in a retirement home, Michael falls for a beautiful Marilyn Monroe look-alike who suggests he move to a commune of impersonators in the Scottish Highlands. At the seaside castle, Michael discovers everyone preparing for the commune’s first-ever gala - Abe Lincoln, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Stooges, the Queen, the Pope, Madonna, Buckwheat, Sammy Davis, Jr… And also Marilyn’s daughter Shirley Temple and her possessive husband Charlie Chaplin. Meanwhile, a miracle is happening somewhere in a Latin American jungle.

tMF heard the news about an exciting new film - a visually appealing and emotionally-charged new full-length feature film from South Africa. Recently launched to much acclaim in Durban, the new film features the haunting and evocative landscapes of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

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Oil on Water is about a creative young couple, Max and Anna, whose idyllic lives begin to spiral out of control when Max starts experiencing strange symptoms that he cannot share with Anna. Bound to Max by love and art, Anna is at first confused. She later becomes increasingly desperate as she has to confront her fears of loss and abandonment, fears which are the result of her childhood experiences as well as actual happenings in her relationship with Max. When these symptoms - the origins of which could be paranormal, psychological, or possibly even from Anna's own writing - begin to manifest in Max's art, Anna moves to utter hopelessness in the face of the incomprehensible changes.

In the tradition of Gus van Sant's previous three films - Gerry, Elephant and Last Days - his latest offering Paranoid Park revolves around the exploration of youth.

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A teenaged boy and his friend check out a mythologized skate park. The youth’s attraction to its culture of punkish freedom and the hypnotic rhythms of ball bearings on concrete lead him into a fast friendship with a low-life anarchist. Something horrific happens at the nearby railyards, and suddenly our young man is at the centre of a criminal investigation. says Noah Cowan @TIFF.

While Gerry has a slow deliberate pace and Last days and Elephant with its deep sense of foreboding, Paranoid Park combines both elements with ease and a certain finesse only a director of van Sant's calibre can achieve. Newcomer Gabe Nevins, got the lead role after he auditioned via MySpace.

Similarly themed with van Sant's Elephant but with a certain European flair is the new Estonian film, Klass.

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Awarded as the Best European Film at the recent Karlovy Váry International Film Festival, the Klass features Joosep, the class dork that has been bullied his entire life. When one of his classmates Kaspar, stands up for him, an open war starts, with the class on one side and the two boys on the other. The 16 year old boys decide to punish their classmates and Joosep’s father is in the armed forces and keeps weapons at home.

The film is the first full-length feature of Ilmar Raag, known for his work in Estonian television.