Peter Jackson has come a long way since his 1987 debut Bad Taste, a shoestring-budget splatter film shot in his native New Zealand that went on to earn a cult following. Yet there's something of that film's inventive and playful spirit in almost everything he's done since, be it bawdy puppets (1989's Meet the Feebles), killer teens (1994's Heavenly Creatures) or ice-skating apes (2005's King Kong). The Lord of the Rings trilogy made him a household name and earned him Oscar acclaim, while he's currently producing the long-awated prequel, The Hobbit, with Guillermo del Toro directing. As Jackson's latest, the murder-thriller-fantasy The Lovely Bones, arrives in cinemas, we caught up with him and asked him to name his all-time favorite films. He happily obliged. "My five favourite films of all time," Jackson pondered. "For different reasons, they would be... "

Spike Jonze's eagerly-anticipated adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was initially supposed to use entirely practical effects, but the director soon realised he'd need more sophisticated computer trickery to bring the seven 'emotionally complex' (i.e. grumpy) Wild Things to life. That's where London's Framestore came in, the effects house needing to seamlessly animate all the monsters without compromising Spike Jonze's naturalistic vision for the project. RT went to visit them this week at their Soho headquarters, where Animation Director Michael Eames and Director of VFX Tim Webber told us how they did it, and shared some exclusive behind-the-scenes shots.

Yesterday we marvelled at the wonders of sound, color, 3-D and CinemaScope -- innovations that changed the way audiences viewed movies forever. Today, it's time to cross over to the less auspicious side of gimmickry. Behold! Odorama! Snuff! The Tingler? Will Avatar's blue, dreadlocked Na'vi be remembered with such reverence?

Robert Downey Jr. can't quite remember why he was on the phone to Guy Ritchie the first time Sherlock Holmes was mentioned, but it was to give him some advice about the trailer for his comic thriller RocknRolla, not to bid for the lead in his $80m Victorian detective caper. But Downey does remember that when the conversation finally swung round that way, Ritchie told him he'd be too old for it anyway. Nevertheless, within weeks of that chat, a press conference was held in the Freemasons Hall in central London, announcing the news that Downey had signed to play the eccentric sleuth. Just over 12 months later, the film is imminent, and what at first looked like stunt casting now appears to be a stroke of crazy genius. Once a cadaverous codger with a deerstalker hat and fogey pipe, Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous literary creation gets a jolt of adrenaline with Downey's firecracker performance, cutting a psychedelic swathe through the fog of Old London Town. He talks exclusively to Rotten Tomatoes about the challenge of playing the most brilliant man there never was...

James Cameron's 'Avatar' is almost here, and if it's anything like the director's been promising-a new way to experience immersive 3-D movies, whatever that mean-then the industry could be about to enter a new phase of technology. So to mark the release of the latest revolution in film technology, we took a look back-way back--at the ones that have come before it. In the first of our two-part series about the technological advances that changed the movie industry forever, we look at the gimmicks that are now part of the standard moviegoing experience. Tomorrow, we look at the ones that weren't so fortunate.