Ethan Hawke will present his latest film, The Woman in the Fifth, and receive the Levantine Cinema Arts Award from the festival, honoring his multifaceted career in the arts. Additionally, director Richard Linklater will join Hawke for a tenth anniversary screening of their 2001 collaboration, Tape. Also premiering at the 2011 Cinema Arts Festival Houston are several major upcoming releases: the critically acclaimed The Artist, Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, and Wim Wenders' Pina in 3D.

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference & Festival is happy to announce the first round of confirmed speakers for the 2009 event, to be held March 13-21, 2009 in Austin, Texas.

**  (111m | PG-13) When the executives at Paramount Pictures saw Billy Bob Thornton play a bitter, abusive, drunkard shopping-mall Kris Kringle in 2003's raunchy, bitingly funny "Bad Santa," they must have said to themselves, "If we water this down to a PG-13, we'll make a mint!" Thus was born this lackluster remake of a once-edgy yet family-friendly Little League comedy full of cursing pre-pubescent underdogs that has lost both its bite and its heart.

By Sweet, David Lehardy THIS ESSAY EXAMINES THE AMBIGUOUS, even contradictory, role of the European "slacker" in Alex Garland's The Beach (1997) and Michel Houellebecq's Plateforme (2001).

By Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News Nov. 17--"Fast Food Nation" director Richard Linklater has been a vegetarian for 20 years, so you'd think the movie's slaughterhouse scenes would be tough for him.