This week at IFC News:

Video footage of the "Margot at the Wedding" press conference (with Nicole Kidman, looking distressingly Stepfordesque) is here; footage from the "No Country For Old Men" conference (featuring the notoriously press shy Coen brothers, who clearly do not want to be there) is here.

Aaron Hillis interviews Abel Ferrara:

You know, we’ve done the vampire movie, the gangster movie, and ["Go Go Tales"] is almost a genre, like "La Cage Aux Folles" or "Broadway Danny Rose." I mean, that’s basically a Woody Allen movie, but there is that genre, kind of a musical comedy. That’s what it is. For me, it’s like haiku poetry; you have certain parameters to work within. As an American genre filmmaker, it makes me understand the movies I watch so much better. It’s funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it’s fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.

We have an interview with Anton Corbijn that’s giving us technical difficulties, so look for it tomorrow. In the meantime, in the face of "Lars and the Real Doll," we’ve put together a run-down of recent "kinder, gentler" treatments of fetishes in indie film here.

Michael Atkinson on "12:08 East of Bucharest":

Porumboiu‘s actual title translates to "Was There or Was There Not?"; beneath the film’s head-on simplicity and deadpan wit lies an effortless docket of expressed ideas about memory, national pride, community politics and the new Romania, enduring as so many quasi-Third World states do on the outskirts of legality, poverty and social order. But unlike "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," also shopped by Tartan in this country as a comedy, "12:08 East of Bucharest" is authentically funny, in a boozy-Renoirian kind of way — the laughs drip organically from the characters. Porumboiu’s camera allows us to observe them in real time (as liberating a strategy as it is eventually brutally claustrophobic), and there’s no need for jokes.

This week’s podcast is an appreciation of Mark Wahlberg.

And Christopher Bonet has what’s new in theaters.

+ IFC News