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After seeing Shame upwards of three times in theaters and spending countless hours at MoMA throughout the year hiding out watching his 1994 short film Deadpan, it's safe to say I am more than ready for vicious director Steve McQueen's next film. As one of the most fearless and thrilling directors in contemporary cinema, McQueen crafts harrowing pictures that cut straight to the heart and rip you apart from the inside out.

For someone that's been around Hollywood for most of his life, Joseph Gordon-Levitt seems strangely reluctant to push boundaries. Not that he doesn't take on interesting roles or try his hand in all mediums, but when it comes to his directorial debut, it appears, with each new development, that he is chipping away at something interesting and powerful to make it safe. After re-cutting his Don Jon's Addiction post-Sundance to appease the MPAA and have it fit nicely into an R-rating, the actor/director has taken things a step further by chopping off the "Addiction" from the title. 

In order appease the MPAA, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is cutting some "graphic" sex scenes from his directorial debut Don Jon's Addiction. But I wonder if he's concerned at all about how that will effect the film has a whole? Not to say that I'm assuming it relies on purely on sexual appeal, but for a film about a porn-addicted lothario who is desperately trying to unplug himself from an online world of smut, you'd think to make it really interesting we'd want to see all the gritty and gross aspects of his life. We want to see that point where porn loses all sexual appeal and just becomes this sad and frightening crutch for comfort, offering as much emotional and psychological nourishment as a bowl of M&Ms.

Were Academy members completely out of touch this year? We think so! Check out our picks for this year's best achievements in filmmaking.

Carnage
The easiest way to shock the bourgeoisie is to hold up a mirror, something Carnage director Roman Polanski knows a thing or two about. Adapted from the Tony-winning play by Yasmina Reza, this barbed and lively film owes everything to its exceptional leads—Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, and John C. Reilly—and is so agoraphobic it could almost have been filmed on a stage set. The scene is contemporary Brooklyn, with its peculiar liberal clash of granola and BlackBerrys. Two couples, one haughty in its feigned lack of pretension, the other pretentious in its delusions of grandeur, meet in an apartment one winter afternoon to discuss an afterschool brawl that involved the child of one pair thwacking the offspring of the other with a stick. It doesn’t take long for everything to come apart at the seams. After several hysterical monologues and a prodigious amount of vomit courtesy of Ms. Winslet, what remains is a miasma of hypocrisy and self-delusion, which is not to say the whole affair isn't terribly funny. If nervous laughter is a sign that you’re too close to home, Carnage cuts to the quick. —Megan Conway

With 'Shame,' British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen has crafted one of the year's most talked about films ...

Shame, the highly anticipated film from Steve McQueen (the director, not the very cool and very dead actor) has garnered a lot of attention due to its NC-17 rating. Full-frontal nudity! Multiple boobs! And it also happens to be receiving attention from critics who say it’s a very good movie about the main character (played by Michael Fassbender) and his struggle with sex addiction. Thanks to Movieline, you can take a virtual tour through Shame’s New York City, and see where all this compulsive mating takes place.

If there's one thing we all know about sex addicts, it's that they run. A lot. To and from their sexual encounters. Sexual encounters that get them into troubles, like being hit in the face by jealous boyfriends. And also a lot of dinners, because you can't just get anyone into bed without buying them dinner first, right? Sex addiction really focuses on the challenge.