“Arguably the year’s most visionary film with true indie cred,” as Graham Fuller puts it, Beasts of the Southern Wild was nominated for two Gotham Independent Film Award awards Friday, but inexplicably not for best feature.

As the New York Film Festival closed, Criticwire polled critics on their festival favorites. While Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or–winning Amour continued to fare well, Leos Carax (subject of our 2000 Regis Dialogue) was the top vote-getter, for Holy Motors.

London’s National Gallery director Nicholas Penny shares some thoughts about art he doesn’t like: “The art form I don’t relate to – I’d put it more strongly actually – is video because it seems to me so often merely to be an incompetent form of film.”

Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka discusses his works, cinema history, and the current status of film. His new project, Monument Film, will screen at the London Film Festival’s Experimenta weekend, which showcases artists’ film and video.

British filmmaker Andrea Arnold shares her thoughts on cinema and her modern adaptation of Wuthering Heights. “I’m fascinated with what an audience will take away from an image. Bresson said something like, ‘A look in the eye can start a war,’ and it’s true.”

“I’m not entirely convinced that digital technology is sophisticated enough to compare with the quality of celluloid on a big screen,” says Joshua Siegel, who organized MoMA’s cinema preservation festival of rare, restored works on film, which opens this week.

The British Film Institute announced this week that it’d be making selections from its vast archive available online. By the end of 2013 it plans on releasing the online BFIPlayer, and by 2017 it hopes to have 10,000 titles digitized.

“There was no film-making culture here at all under Gaddafi,” says Libyan filmmaker Naziha Arebi. “He didn’t want anybody to be more famous than him.” Now, a year after the dictator was ousted, Libya is undergoing an unexpected cinematic revolution.

Inspired by Intercat ’73, the 2nd International Cat Film Festival held at the Elgin Theatre nearly 40 years ago, the Harvard Film Archive launches Intercatnet ’12, a blog series which debuts with, among others, Cassandra Cat, Vojtech Jasný’s 1963 film.